*."^^^- ^^^ 






^<^ 



.v^^' '^/>. 



1^.- .v^ 



^ .V; 













:\' 



^-"^.^.^^^ ,i.o-' 






s-"'. ->' = ''° a^ 



% ^^- 



."^ ^ „(<.. 



<^\^\:l'. 



f 



^'^ 4^ 






^■!-^r/^ 



^% ^'^> 









^ -',rC5 



.-^ 



<^^ c 









.A- 



%' 



0^ 



'^o^ 



o^ 






A' c-, >- W 



^;/^^ 






^\' 






■' o \ 



■'-"-.^ 



^•:d^ 



OO^ 


■■•' V ■ ^^ ^ -^ V- 






' o\ \ -^ : 




x^°.. 



."^' 



.^ 






x^^x. 



H -A 



O^ ,,,,^ ,NV 






■x^^' -^^ 



%" 






-• St' 












.!?-."- 



^.^X'-^tr^:^^/ 



o. 









"^ <0^' 









^.cf^-' ^'^y:^} 



r- aN" 



o^ i^. 



-V 






< 









.To^:^- 






A' 














-^J 





> '/>. 



■x^ "^^. 



.-^ 



0' 



V 









''J- 


v^' 








.0 


'X-. 






,/ 



S^% 










5 N ■ /N> 









--^^ V^^ 



. *o -^^. 



-^. .^^ 



vV ^c^ 



^-j^jOfvv. 















/ (^ 


. "^ 


.\ 


o ^ 


'^^ 






.^^ 


^^^"^ "^ f ,^o^' 




"■^^ 


V^' 








^0°x. 


J. 


^'<<>yMiJ r s 



^. < 






i"'' :&. 



NOTES IN JAPAN 




(f^?l^wap«fCr:^ 



-^>w 



[See pag-e lo 



IN KASUGA PARK, NARA— AN OLD CRYPTOMERIA 



NOTES IN JAPAN 



BY 



ALFRED 'PARSONS 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR 




NEW YORK 

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

1896 




:^^^la. 




60^ 



Copyright, 1895, by Harper & Brothers. 

A /I rights reserved. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

THE JAPANESE SPRING , . 3 



EARLY SUMMER IN JAPAN 45 

THE TIME OF THE LOTUS , 8r 

FUJISAN 119 

AUTUMN IN JAPAN , . . . I53 

SOME WANDERINGS IN JAPAN .......... i8q 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 

IN KASUGA PARK, NARA — AN OLD CRYPTOMERIA .... Frontispiece 

DEDICATION vii 

CHERRY-BLOSSOM BADGE, YOSHINO 2 

IN THE INLAND SEA 4 

HILLS NEAR KOBE, FROM SUWA-YAMA 5 

EARLY PLUM BLOSSOMS, OKAMOTO, NEAR KOBE 7 

THE TORII OF KASUGA TEMPLE, NARA 11 

OLD WISTARIA IN KASUGA PARK, NARA I3 

THE PAGODA OF KOBUKUJI, NARA I4 

CHERRY-TREE AND LANTERNS, NI-GWATSU-DO, NARA . . . 1 5 

THE WELL OF SANKATCHU, NARA 1 7 

CHERRY BLOSSOMS IN THE RAIN, NARA . I9 

SARA-HIKI-SAKA, NEAR YOSHINO — LATER CHERRIES 21 

CHERRY AND LATE PLUM, TEMA-CHO, NEAR NARA 23 

A BUDDHIST TEMPLE AT YOSHINO — DOUBLE-FLOWERED CHERRY 

AND MAGNOLIA 27 

CROSSING THE FERRY AT MUDA, ON THE YOSHINO-GAWA . . . 30 

MI KOMORI JINJA, A SHINTO TEMPLE NEAR YOSHINO . . . . 31 

THE STREET, HASE 34 

ANDROMEDA BUSHES IN KASUGA PARK, NARA 35 

WHITE WISTARIA, HASE-DERA 37 

A TALL WISTARIA, KASUGA PARK, NARA 39 

NOTES AT MUDA. 4I 

BADGE OF THE KIKU-SUI-YA 42 

xi 



PAGE 

IRIS JAPONICA 44 

CARRYING HOME TEA LEAVES, NEAR UJI 46 

A PLANTATION COVERED WITH MATTING NEAR UJI 47 

POND IN THE GARDEN OF RAKU-RAKU-TEI, HIKONE 49 

THE CASTLE AT HIKONE 5I 

THE CASTLE AT NAGOYA, FIELD OF IRIS IN THE FOREGROUND , 52 

AN OLD CASTLE MOAT, AKASHI, NEAR KOBE . . 53 

FIELDS NEAR LAKE BIWA 55 

O KAZU SAN 57 

PREPARING THE RICE-FIELDS 59 

MY ROOMS AT TENNENJI 60 

BUDDHA AND HIS DISCIPLES, TENNENJI 61 

HIKONE AND LAKE BIWA, FROM THE HILLS BEHIND TENNENJI . 64 

AZALEAS ON THE ROCKS, TENNENJI 65 

THE POEM 67 

WHITE AZALEA BUSH, RAKU-RAKU-TEI, HIKONE 69 

THE BAMBOO GROVE, TENNENJI 7 1 

SUNSET OVER LAKE BIWA, FROM TENNENJI 75 

PLANTING RICE 77 

A SPRING FLOWER — JIRO-BO 78 

PLATYCODON GRANDIFLORUM, " KIKYO " 80 

AURATUM LILIES AND BOCCONIA ON THE HILLS NEAR NIKKO . 82 

A FIELD OF LILIES, OFUNA, NEAR KAMAKURA 83 

SEVEN BEAUTIFUL FLOWERS OF LATE SUMMER 85 

HYDRANGEA BUSH, TOTSUKA, NEAR YOKOHAMA 87 

UNDER THE CRYPTOMERIAS AT NIKKO 89 

A LITTLE TEMPLE AT NIKKO 9I 

KIRIFURI, NEAR NIKKO ,,.... 93 

THE MOOR NEAR YUMOTO ,..../ 94 

A WET DAY AT CHUZENJI 95 

THE FOOT OF NANTAI-ZAN 97 

THE MOAT OF BENTEN-SHIBA 99 

SPECTATORS IO4 

THE LAST TEA LEAVES — COTTAGE NEAR YOKOHAMA . . . . I05 

LOTUS-PONDS AT KAMAKURA , IO7 

xii 



PAGE 

LOTUS-PATCH AMONG THE RICE-FIELDS, KAWASAKI, TOKYO , . IO9 

A TEA-HOUSE AT KAMAKURA IIO 

YORITOMO'S WILLOWS AND HIS SHRINE . Ill 

JAPANESE WRESTLERS II3 

LESPEDEZA " HAGI " II5 

THE HEART-LEAVED LILY II6 

CAMPANULAS ON FUJI II8 

GOING UP IN THE MIST 121 

A CLOUDY EVENING, FROM THE SANDS OF TAGO-NO-URA , . I23 

FUJI FROM THE ABEKAWA, AND THE TOKAIDO BRIDGE . . . I24 

ON THE NORTHERN SLOPE OF FUJI — GRASS-CUTTERS RETURNING 126 

THE SECOND SHELTER IN THE GOTAMBA PATH 128 

FUJI WITH ITS CAP ON I3O 

FUJI FROM THE KAWAGUCHI LAKE I3I 

FROM THE TOP OF FUJI, LOOKING NORTH , I33 

THE GREAT PALM AT RYUGEJI, FUJI IN THE DISTANCE . . , 1 35 

THE CRATER OF FUJI I36 

AN OLD RED PINE AT YOSHIDO I39 

NAKA-NO-CHAYA, ON THE NORTHERN SLOPE I43 

THE RED-PINE GROVE AT YOSHIDA I45 

FUJI OVER THE RICE-FIELDS OF SUZUKAWA I46 

THE FLOWERY MOORLAND I47 

TAIL-PIECE 150 

THE AUTUMN LILY I52 

FIELDS NEAR HAMAMATSU 1 54 

THE EDGE OF THE TOKAIDO, NEAR HAMAMATSU 1 55 

THE ISLAND OF AWAJI, FROM MAIKO 1 58 

ON THE SHORE NEAR MAIKO, THE STRAIT OF AKASHI TO THE 

RIGHT 159 

LILIES BY THE SHORE, SUMA 160 

A GRAVEYARD AT SUMA 161 

HILLS BEHIND KOBE 162 

A BAMBOO-YARD AT MAIBARA 1 63 

BLUE WATER-WEED 164 

THE TRAVELLING THEATRE AT MAIBARA I65 

xiii 



PAGE. 

LAUNCHING A BOAT l68 

LAKE BIWA WITH FLOODED RICE-FIELDS, NEAR MAIBARA . . 169 

ONE OF THE " YAMA " AT THE NAGAHAMA MATSURI . . . . 173 

SOME HATS AT THE NAGAHAMA MATSURI 1 74 

THE TEMPLE GARDEN, SEIGWANJI I75 

MINIATURE PAGODA IN THE TEMPLE GARDEN, SEIGWANJI . . 177 

A CHRYSANTHEMUM SHOW AT YOKOHAMA 1 79 

THE ARSENAL GARDEN, KOISHIKAWA, TOKYO 183 

TAIL-PIECE 185 

LYCHNIS GRANDIFLORA, MISAKA-TOGE 186 

TRICYRTIS HIRTA, ATAMI 188 

TAGO-NO-URA IQI 

COTTAGES AT NEMBA I92 

LAKE SUWA AND THE NAKASENDO MOUNTAINS, FROM KAMI- 

NO-SUWA 195 

TOURISTS AT A WATERFALL I99 

NIEGAWA, ON THE NAKASENDO . , 201 

A LITTLE SHINTO SHRINE, NEAR THE NAKASENDO ..... 202 

A BOAT-MENDER BY THE TENRYUGAWA 203 

BANANA-TREES AT ATAMI 207 

THE FERRY AT TOKIMATA 2O9 

ON THE TENRYUGAWA 2IO 

THE VILLAGE STREET, ATAMI — VRIES ISLAND IN THE DISTANCE 211 

ON THE TENRYUGAWA, NEAR KAJIMA 213 

AUTUMN-GRASS (SUZUKi) 215 

A RUSTIC BRIDGE AT DOGASHIMA, NEAR MIYA-NO-SHITA . . 219 
AVENUES OF TORII IN FRONT OF AN INARI TEMPLE, NEAR 

SHIMIZU. 221 

JIZO SAMA, NEAR HAKONE 223 

TAIL-PIECE 226 



THE JAPANESE SPRING 




CHERRY-BLOSSOM BADGE, YOSHINO 



THE JAPANESE SPRING 




E had left Hong-Kong en- 
veloped in its usual spring 
fog, and for five long, 
weary days had steamed 
across the China Sea in 
regular monsoon weather, 
gray and wet and misera- 
ble, but during the fifth 
some rocky islands, outly- 
ing sentinels of the three 
thousand which compose 
the Mikado's realm, and occasional square - sailed, high- 
sterned boats, showed that we were near Japan, the Far 
East, the Land of Flowers and of the Rising Sun, the 
country which for years it had been my dream to see and 
paint; and by six o'clock in the evening, on the 9th of 
March, we were at anchor in Nagasaki Bay. The aspect of 
that port on a wet day was not inviting, nor were the little 
grimy girls, who in a chattering, laughing line carried their 
baskets of coal on board; so, difficult as it was to decline 
the hospitable invitations of the English residents, I decid- 
ed to go on with the ship to Kobe. Early in the morning 
of the nth we passed through the Strait of Shimonoseki — 
the sun shining brightly on the snowy hills and on the crowd 
of fishing-boats which had been sheltering there from the 

3 



bad weather — and entered the Inland Sea. After so many- 
days of monotonous gray ocean it was delightful to steam 
along in sight of land, and wind about among the islets 
and rocks, so near to many of them that we could see the 
little villages, the mists of white plum blossoms, the rows 
of beans and barley growing wherever a level patch could 
be made on the steep slopes, the people at work in their 




IN THE INLAND SEA 



fields, and always in the distance the ranges of snow-cov- 
ered mountains in Kiushiu and Shikoku, the islands which 
enclose this lovely sea on the south. I longed to land and 
begin work at once, with a nervous dread in my heart that 
I should find nothing so good elsewhere, and, indeed, 
though there is plenty of material to be found everywhere 




HILLS NEAR KOBE, FROM SUWA-YAMA 



in Japan, I saw nothing finer than these islands of the In- 
land Sea, to cruise about among them in a comfortable 
boat would be an ideal way to spend a summer, and would 
probably not be devoid of adventure, for our captain told 
me many tales of treacherous currents and sudden squalls 
and sunken reefs. 

We reached Kobe next morning, and before I had been 
on shore more than an hour I had heard of a village six 
miles away which was celebrated for its plum orchards, and 
had started off to find it. Okamoto lies at the foot of the 
hills which rise behind Kobe on the north, and climbs a 
little way up them, and in front of the highest cottage, a 
modest tea-house with platforms arranged to accommodate 
the visitors who come in crowds to gaze at the blossoms, I 
unfolded my stool and easel, and in spite of a bitter wind 
and vicious little snow-storms made my first sketch in 
Japan. All round me and in the village below were the 

5 



pink-and-white trees, then a band of rice-lands, pale green 
with young barley, and beyond them lay Osaka Bay, and 
the mountains of Yamato, which constantly changed in 
color as snow-storms passed over, or gleams of sun lighted 
the shining water and the snow on the distant hills. It is 
an exciting thing to begin work in a new country, to com- 
pare the local color and the atmosphere with those you 
have tried before, and to find yourself half unconsciously 
using an entirely new set of pigments. I was too absorbed 
with these problems to take any notice of the fact that my 
back was aching, but after two hours, when I had finished 
my drawing, I found myself unable to rise from that sketch- 
ing-stool, and for the next fortnight an attack of lumbago 
prevented my seeing anything more of the plum groves. 
The Buddhist pictures of their Inferno depict many in- 
genious tortures ; I think they ought to add a man with 
lumbago doing six miles over a Japanese by-road in a jin- 
ricksha. When at last I got back to Okamoto there were 
still some blossoms, and the trees were tinged with the 
pink of withered petals, but the luxuriant freshness had 
gone. 

On the 13th of April I said good-bye to my friends and 
to the comforts of the Kobe Club, and started for Nara, 
stopping on my way at Osaka to have a look at the 
town and see the peach blossoms on Momo-Yama (peach 
mountain). The narrow streets leading up the hill were 
crowded with visitors, and among the orchards of dwarf 
trees temporary tea-sheds and resting-places had been erect- 
ed for their comfort and refreshment. In spite of the 
many picturesque features in these fetes the whole effect is 
at first disappointing : railings and stages of new raw deal, 
the untidy and unfinished look of rough bamboo structures, 
with corners of matting hanging loosely in places where they 
interfere with the perspective lines, the slovenly pathways, 





_ 


J •- 


liiiii ^"S 


^^&fe 


II 


H^l^fp:: 






p 


H n 




^M' 


M 


■u ^ .^...^^^^^p^ 


^i 


r^.7^p 




^1 


r vfl|P 


f^. 


■ " ', -' ' ;■; ;y ^,..^pr;'',.^-t,; 




»li^ 




■'■.^^-|p|^;;^^^ 


^%i 


^^'^ 


mi 


'.'.■o^^&d^ '^1 


n 


^^^^ 




■H^^PPV^^ 


fn 


'i^ 


w^ JMp 


tef^^'if' 


%ii 


'Infill '^^K 


B^Mf^^P 


^m 


'^^^? 


Hh^^^x vL 


^m 



EARLY PLUM BLOSSOMS, OKAMOTO, NEAR KOBE 



which are mud or dust according to the weather — all these 
things make unsatisfactory accessories for the figures and 
the flowers. After a time they obtrude themselves less on 
your notice, and you have learned to accept the fact that 
Japan is not a country of big masses and broad effects, but 
of interesting bits and amusing details. This is usually 
true of its landscape ; the forms of mountains and trees are 
more quaint than grand, and the cultivated land has no 
broad stretches of pasture or corn, but is cut up into 
patches, mainly rice-fields, with various vegetables grown in 
little squares here and there. 

It was as yet too early in the year for any rice to be plant- 
ed out. In the fertile valley through which the railway 
runs from Osaka to Nara some new fields were lying wet 
or fallow, others were being prepared by spade labor, and 
others again, not yet flooded, were covered with the bright 
green of young barley, or the strong light yellow of rape in 
flower. 

Though I had read much about life in Japan, it was an 
embarrassing experience to be set down for the first time 
with my baggage in a Japanese room, and to try and adapt 
myself mentally to the possibilities of living under such 
conditions. In a bare hut or tent the problem is compara- 
tively simple ; there is always one way by which you must 
enter ; but in a Japanese room there is too much liberty ; 
three of the walls are opaque sliding screens, the fourth is 
a transparent, or rather translucent, one ; you can come in 
or go out where you like ; there is no table on which things 
must be put, no chair on which you must sit, no fireplace 
to stand with your back to — just a clean, matted floor and 
perfect freedom of choice. European trunks look hope- 
lessly ugly and unsympathetic in such surroundings, nor 
are matters much improved when the host, in deference to 
the habits of a foreigner, sends in a rough deal table, with 

9 



a cloth of unhemmed cotton, intended to be white, and an 
uncompromising, straight-backed deal chair. These hid- 
eous articles make a man feel ashamed, for though they are 
only a burlesque of our civilization, they are produced with 
an air of pride which shows that the owner is convinced 
they are the right thing, and one cannot but be humili- 
ated by their ugliness and want of comfort. Yet if you 
want to read or write you have to keep them and make the 
best of them, for a long evening on the floor is only to be 
borne after a good many weeks of practice. Things begin 
to look brighter and pleasanter when the little waiting-maid 
appears, bringing first some cushions and the hibachi, with 
its pile of glowing charcoal, and then the tea-tray and a few 
sweet cakes. This was more the sort of thing I had ex- 
pected, and made me at once feel at home with my sur- 
roundings. It is the first attention shown you in every tea- 
house, no matter how humble ; whether you go as an inmate, 
or whether you merely sit down for a few minutes' rest on 
a journey, the little tea-pot and the tiny cups are at once 
produced, and the hibachi is placed by your side, a pleas- 
ant and friendly welcome, which never failed to make its 
impression on me, however poor the quality of the tea 
might be. The Kiku-sui-ya (which means Chrysanthemum- 
water house) is near the entrance to the great Kasuga 
Park at Nara ; just outside it the road passes under a 
granite torii flanked with stone lanterns, and winds up to 
the temple through an avenue of cryptomerias, with rows 
of lanterns on each side, which get closer and closer to- 
gether as they near the temple buildings, and are so nu- 
merous that tradition says they have never been counted. 
There are booths here and there where pilgrims can rest 
and get a cup of tea, for pilgrimage in Japan is not made 
unnecessarily uncomfortable, and where the tame deer 
congregate to take the nuts and cakes which are sold 




THE TORII OF KASUGA TEMPLE, NARA 



for them to the passers-by. From early morning till 
nearly sundown this road is lively with groups of vis- 
itors. Nara is so near to Osaka that among them a 
sprinkling of men, mostly no doubt engaged in commerce, 
wore foreign dress, but the majority of the people were 
in their native clothes, and as I sat and painted by the 
road-side I could study the variations of Japanese cos- 
tume — from that of the old peasant with his white or blue 




OLD WISTARIA IN KASUGA PARK, NARA 



leggings, straw shoes, big hat, and robe tucked into his 
girdle, his head shaved down the middle, and the back 
hair turned up in a queue in the ancient mode, to that of 
the gay young musume with her rich silk kimono, gorgeous 
scarlet petticoat, broad obi, and black-lacquered sandals on 
her pigeon-toed, white-socked feet. The cryptomerias are 
good, but the old wistarias are the glory of Kasuga Park. 
The great Fujiwara family formerly owned or were patrons 
of the temple, and though it is now imperial property, their 
crest, the wistaria flower (^fuji no hand)^ is still worn by the 

13 



little girls who perform the sacred dance there, and all over 
the park the wistaria vines are allowed to grow as they 
choose, their great snaky stems writhing along the ground 
and twisting up to the tops of the highest trees. 

One very wet day, when painting out-of-doors was impos- 
sible, I went round to see the sights of Nara — Kobukuji 
with its pagoda and fine old statues, the great Buddha, 
the celebrated big bell, and beyond these the Buddhist 
temple Ni-gwatsu-do, perched on a hill-side, the steps lead- 
ing up to it lined with stone lanterns, little shrines, and 
booths for the sale of endless trifles. The platform sur- 
rounding this temple is supported in front by a scaffolding 




^mf; 



THE PAGODA OF KOBUKUJI, NARA 
14 




CHERKY-TREE AND LANTERNS, NI-GWATSU-DO, NARA 



of beams, at the back it abuts against the hill, and from the 
heavy projecting roof which covers both platform and 
temple hang hundreds of bronze lanterns, votive offer- 
ings. Each of these had been appropriated by a spar- 
row ; trusting to the sanctity of the spot, they had piled in 
all the rubbish they could find to make their nests ; odd 
ends of straw and paper stuck out everywhree, showing that 
their stay in the East had not taught them tidy habits. I 
am sorry to say that their confidence was misplaced; a temple 
festival came round before their eggs were hatched, and the 
whole of them with their embryo families were ruthlessly 
evicted in order that the lanterns might be lighted. 

The park at Nara is one of the few places in Japan where 
you can see real turf, and even there I was struck by the 
scarcity of ground flowers ; there were plenty of scentless 

15 



-violets, some yellow and white dandelions, and in the damp 
ditches a little purple flower called jirobo by the country 
people, but there was nothing to compare with the masses 
of daisies, buttercups, and cowslips which make the Eng- 
lish meadows so bright in the spring. Perhaps the moun- 
tain moorlands would have been as gay at that time as I 
found them later in the year ; the fields are far too well cul- 
tivated for any weed to get a chance of flowering. 

The earlier cherry-trees were in blossom by this time, and 
I lingered on, making studies of them, and learning Japan- 
ese words and ways from O Nao San, a young lady about 
twelve years old, who had appointed herself my special at- 
tendant and protector at the Kiku-sui Hotel. One night at 
the theatre I saw a modern farce, with a policeman, an old- 
fashioned Japanese gentleman, a Chinaman, and an Eng- 
lishman as the comic characters. They were ridiculous 
and amusing, but when all the earlier incidents of the piece 
were narrated with conscientious realism in evidence before 
a magistrate the thing became monotonous, and struck me 
as faulty in dramatic construction. This was the only the- 
atre I saw in Japan in which they had discarded the orches- 
tra and chorus and other traditions of the old stage. 

There is a modest little temple opposite Kobukuji, which 
is visited by most of the pilgrims to Nara ; in its court-yard 
is a pile of stones from which a stream of water flows, fed 
by the tears of the mother of Sankatchu, a sacrilegious man 
who killed some of the sacred deer, who was killed himself 
in consequence, and buried here by her. Day after day 
groups of visitors stand by the fountain, listening intently 
to the guide who tells them the pathetic story, and give 
their prayers and a few coppers to her memory. The fam- 
ily affections are strong in Japan, and the love between pa- 
rents and children, and among the children themselves, is 
always pleasant to see. The little ones are never slapped 

i6 



or shaken or pulled about roughly; you may wander through 
the streets for days without hearing a child cry, nor do they 
often quarrel in their play. But it is possible to go too far, 
even in filial piety. There was a murder trial while I was 
in the country, and by the evidence it appeared that the 
prisoner's mother was blind, that the doctor had prescribed 
the application of a warm human liver, and that he, as he 



/--^ii^'**- 






/y 







THE WELL OF SANKATCHU. NARA 



could find no other way to get the remedy, had killed his 
wife in order to restore his mother's sight. 

In most forms of Japanese art the technique which is ad- 
mired by native connoisseurs, and the associations connect- 
ed with the subject represented, can only be understood by 
those who have studied Japanese methods and traditions, 
but the old wooden statuary has more in common with 

Western art, and often reaches a high point of realism. In 
B 17 



the religious figures certain traditions had to be followed, 
and in looking at these this fact has to be remembered ; the 
exaggerated anatomy, unnaturally fierce expressions, and 
arbitrary number of limbs often disguise their true merits ; 
but in the portrait figures of daimios, priests, and abbots 
the treatment is both simple and dignified. Mr. Takenou- 
chi, a sculptor to whom I had letters, was making admira- 
ble copies of the principal sculptures at Kobukuji, which 
were to be exhibited at Chicago, and afterwards added to 
the collection of the Fine Art Museum in Ueno Park, 
Tokyo. Among the old masters, Unkei, a sculptor of the 
twelfth century, is perhaps the most noteworthy ; there is a 
mendicant ascetic by him in the Hall of the Thirty-three 
Thousand Kwannon at Kyoto, a lean old man, clad only in 
a few rags, resting on his staff and holding out his left hand 
for alms, which might rank with the work of Rodin. 

On the 25th of April the cherry-trees were in full flower, 
and I left Nara for Yoshino, a village at the foot of Mount 
Omine, in Yamato, which has for centuries been noted for 
its cherry groves. Here the cult of the cherry blossom has 
its headquarters, and during the ten days or so which the 
blossoms last the little town is crowded with visitors. I 
was too late to see the place in its full glory ; it stands at 
some height above the sea, and I consequently imagined 
that the flowers would be later than those at Nara, but the 
cherry which grows there in such quantities is an early spe- 
cies, and three days of wind and rain had covered the 
ground with pink petals and left very few of them on the 
trees in the celebrated groves. Fortunately there were still 
some flowery trees to be found in gardens and sheltered 
corners, and at this time of year it would be impossible to 
settle down in a Japanese village without finding plenty of 
subjects to paint. The cherry in the Yoshino groves has a 
single flower, pale pink in color ; this is followed by another 

18 




CHERRY BLOSSOMS IN THE RAIN, NARA 



kind with white blossoms, more like the European species. 
Both of these are wild, and from them the Japanese gar- 
deners have raised many varieties, double and single flow- 
ered, some with the growth of the weeping-willow, and oth- 
ers with a spreading habit. The flowers vary in color from 
white to light crimson, and I noticed some young trees with 
large double blossoms which were pale yellow with a pink 
flush on the outer petals, like a delicate tea-rose. 




SAKA-HIKI-SAKA, NEAR YOSHINO— LATER CHERRIES 



At the Tatsumi-ya, just by the remains of the huge bronze 
torii, which, until it was blown down by a hurricane, formed 
the entrance to the main street, I found a little suite of 
rooms built in the garden away from the rest of the house, 
and at once engaged them, in happy anticipation of quiet 



nights. These isolated rooms have some disadvantages, 
such as having to get to the bath and back on wet nights, 
but a very short acquaintance with life in a tea-house makes 
the traveller disregard such trifling inconveniences for the 
certainty of peaceful sleep. The Japanese wanderers usual- 
ly finish their day's journey about five in the afternoon, and, 
after the preliminary cup of tea, discard their travel-stained 
clothes for the clean kimono which every well-regulated tea- 
house supplies to its guests, then bathe in water as near the 
boiling-point as possible, eat their dinner, sit talking and 
smoking till midnight, snore till five o'clock in the morning, 
when the clatter of taking down shutters begins, and the 
elaborate business of tooth - cleaning and tongue - scraping, 
with an accompaniment of complex noises suggesting sea- 
sickness in its worst stages, so it is not till they have de- 
parted at six or seven o'clock that a light sleeper gets much 
chance. In the daytime the tea-house is deserted, except 
by the proprietor, who sits in the front room and does his 
accounts, and by the little servant -girls, who, with their 
heads tied up in towels, kimono tucked into their obi, and 
sleeves fastened back, showing a good deal of round brown 
leg and arm, busily sweep and dust the rooms in prepara- 
tion for the new set of visitors who will arrive in the even- 
ing. The thin sliding partitions would be little bar to sound 
even if they reached to the top of the room, and above them 
there is generally a foot or so of open wood-work, which al- 
lows free ventilation and conversation between the different 
apartments. Privacy, as we understand it, is no part of the 
scheme of a Japanese tea-house. Real fresh air from out- 
side is very difficult to get at night. During the hot weather 
I was always careful to examine the fastenings of the wood- 
en shutters with which, after dark, every house is enclosed 
like a box, so that I could surreptitiously open a crack op- 
posite my room, although by so doing I was disobeying the 




CHERRY AND LATE PLUM, TEMA-CHO, NEAR NARA 



police regulations. These shutters do not keep out the 
noise of the watchman, who all night long wanders round 
and knocks two blocks of wood together, just to let burglars 
know that he is on the lookout. 

In these quarters I spent a week or so, painting all day 
when the weather would allow me, and in the evening 
struggling with the language and gambling for beans with 
the family and the servant-girls, who played vingt-et-un {?ti 
Ju ichi) with such keenness and discretion that I was gen- 
erally made a bankrupt, with much laughter and clapping 
of hands, quite early in the game, and had to be set up 
again by general contribution. 

Everything in Yoshino is redolent of the cherry; the 
pink and white cakes brought in with the tea are in the 
shape of its blossoms, and a conventional form of it is 
painted on every lantern and printed on every scrap of 
paper in the place. The shops sell preserved cherry flowers 
for making tea, and visitors to the tea-houses and temples 
are given maps of the district — or, rather, broad sheets 
roughly printed in colors, not exactly a map or a picture — 
on which every cherry grove is depicted in pink. And all this 
is simply enthusiasm for its beauty and its associations, for 
the trees bear no fruit worthy of the name. There is an old 
Japanese saying, " What the cherry blossom is among flow- 
ers, the warrior is among men." I was reminded constant- 
ly of a sentence which a friend had written in one of my 
books, " Take pains to encourage the beautiful, for the use- 
ful encourages itself." It is difficult for an outsider to 
determine how much of this is genuine enthusiasm and how 
much is custom or a traditional aestheticism ; but it really 
matters little. That the popular idea of a holiday should 
be to wander about in the open air, visiting historic places, 
and gazing at the finest landscapes and the flowers in their 
seasons, indicates a high level of true civilization, and the 

25 



custom, if it be only custom, proves the refinement of the 
people who originated and adhere to it. 

The village street of Yoshino winds up a spur of the 
hills, passing many temples and little hamlets, and gradu- 
ally becomes a steep and stony mountain path, which as- 
cends to Mount Omine. The great tracks of forest provide 
occupation for most of the people in this district ; as I 
sketched by the road-side strings of men and women were 
constantly passing, carrying down heavy loads of wood and 
charcoal from the hills, and in front of many of the cot- 
tages match-wood was spread out on mats to dry. It was 
difficult to understand how it could ever get dry, for all the 
mists of Japan seemed to collect round these mountains 
and forests ; the landscape was rarely free from them, and 
constantly looked like a Japanese drawing, all vague and 
white in the valleys, with ridges of hill and fringes of pine 
showing in sharp clear lines one behind the other. 

It is a warm climate too, and everything grows luxuriant- 
ly. There are great clumps of bamboo, enormous azalea 
bushes, and thick undergrowths of palmetto. On the road- 
side banks in this last week of April, there were ferns just 
unrolling, the fronds of maidenhair (Adia?ttum pedatiim) all 
bright-red young shoots of lily and orchid and Solomon's- 
seal, and a lovely iris (/. Japonica), with many lavender- 
colored flowers on a branching stalk, each outer petal 
marked with dark purple lines, and decorated with a little 
horn of brilliant orange. The gardens of tea-houses and 
temples were gay with azalea, camellia, magnolia, and 
cherry, and with the young leaves of maple and androm- 
eda, as bright as any flowers. During a great part of the 
year these gardens have but few blooms — they are only an 
arrangement of greens and grays — but in the spring no 
amount of clipping and training can prevent the shrubs 
from blossoming. The cherry-trees and magnolias are let 

26 



^^^^^^^^^^^^^B '^ iSb''- i^^H 


.'"*'■ 


•'^ 


IWHRaK^^^ 


M''*?^ 


~- 


' •> J' '\:- ■^^S^^^S^^SsvKi^^^yy^'^ y J 


■■■T^k^BBE 






r'-il" 


F : . 







grow as they choose, but the others are trimmed into more 
or less formal shapes, considered suitable to the species, or 
helping the carefully studied arrangement of forms, which 
is the ideal of a Japanese gardener. There are no beds 
for flowers. In the little ponds the irises and Lotus bloom, 
and in odd corners there may be clumps of lilies, chrysan- 
themums, or other plants, but these are mere accidents : 
the designer's aim is a composition of rocks, shrubs, stone 
lanterns, ponds, and bridges, which will look the same in 
its general features all the year round, and conform to 
established rules. One of my Japanese friends told me, as 
an instance of the complexity of the landscape-gardener's 
art, that if a certain shrub were used it would be necessary 
to place near it a stone from Tosa, the distant province 
where it commonly grows. The decorative garden is quite 
distinct from the flower garden, where the fine varieties of 
iris, pasony, and chrysanthemum, for which Japan is famous, 
are grown by professional florists, or by rich amateurs who 
can devote a special place to their culture. 

On the 3d of May my host at the Tatsumi-ya brought 
me some paeony flowers arranged in an old bronze vase. 
This showed me it was time to move on to Hase, where 
there is a great display of them, so next morning I made 
an early start for a long jinricksha ride through the hills of 
Yamato. My baggage and painting materials could not be 
packed in less than two kuruma, two more were necessary 
for my boy and myself, and the four vehicles, with two men 
drawing each, made an imposing procession as we bumped 
down the steep village street. The whole staff of the Tat- 
sumi-ya had turned out to say good-bye ; there was a row 
of little girls kneeling on the floor, their noses on the mat- 
ting and their brown hands placed flat, palms downward, in 
front of their heads, and the landlord, after giving me the 
usual presents and a receipt for my " chadai " — the part- 

29 



ing tip — insisted on accompanying me to the end of the 
town. 

Our route for two or three miles, as far as the river 
Yoshino - gawa, was the same that I had climbed on my 
way up ; but nine days had made a great difference in its 
aspect. Then many of the trees were still bare ; now they 
were covered with spring leaves. After ferrying over to 
Muda we turned northwards, and a good road led us by 
low passes and through the grand forests at the foot of 




CROSSING THE FERRY AT MUDA, ON THE YOSHINO-GAWA 



Mount Tonomine down to Tosa in the Yamato Valley. 
Jinricksha travelling is very pleasant when the roads are 
good, the weather fine, and the men active ; there is no 
noise of horses' hoofs to disturb the mind, the straw-san- 
dalled feet of the coolies hardly make a sound, nor is your 
attention distracted from the landscape by having to drive; 
and the frequent short halts at way -side tea-houses give 
you a chance of airing your few phrases of Japanese and 
seeing the ways of the people. My lunch at Tosa was en- 

30 




MI KOMORI JINJA, A SHINTO TEMPLE NEAR YOSHINO 



livened by two charming waitresses, who had evidently 
seen but few foreigners, and who were much interested in 
me and my belongings. My watch, match-box, cigarette- 
case, and other small articles had to be examined, talked 
over, and shown to the rest of the household, and I was 
plied with questions about my age, my family, and other 
personal matters, as Japanese etiquette prescribes. 

This valley of Yamato is the earliest historic home of the 
present race ; in it there are many tumuli which mark the 
burial-places of legendary emperors, including that of Jim- 
mu Tenno, the first of all, and it is therefore considered 
sacred ground by the ancestor - loving Japanese. Every 
year crowds of pilgrims walk over the district, making their 
" Yamato-meguri," or tour of the holy places of Yamato, 
and thereout the innkeepers suck no small advantage. Hase 
was full of them, and every tea-house crammed ; in the room 
next mine at least a dozen must have slept, and I thought 
myself lucky to get a place to myself. 

There were still some hours of daylight left after I had 
settled down in my quarters, so I wandered up the street 
and climbed the long flight of steps to the great temple of 
Kwannon. On each side of the steps small beds were built 
up, and in these the paeonies grew, and their big flowers, 
ranging in color from white to dark purple, glowed in the 
afternoon light against a background of gray stone lanterns. 
The temple is built on a hill-side, like Ni-gwatsu-do at Nara 
and many other Buddhist temples, and it consists of a wide 
veranda filled with incense-burners and votive pictures and 
bronze lanterns, and of an inner sanctuary. Across the en- 
trance to this stands an altar, and over it an opening in the 
dark purple curtains allows a glimpse of the great gold fig- 
ure of Kwannon, nearly thirty feet high, her face, with its 
expression of calm beneficence, only just distinguishable by 
the light of a few dim lamps in the gloom of the window- 

Jo 




THE STKEET, HASE 



less shrine. Behind this main temple there are various 
other buildings, priests' houses and such like, and a little 
pond for the sacred tortoises. 

The main street of Hase is cut up with rivulets ; the mid- 
dle one is used for all domestic purposes, and at all hours 
you may see the women, with skirts and sleeves tucked up, 
washing their clothes or their fish and vegetables, and 
ladling up water for baths and cooking with their long- 
handled wooden dippers. The side streams turn small 
water-wheels, which work wooden hammers for pounding 
and cleaning the rice — an important part of the day's work 
in every Japanese village. In the most primitive places it 
is done with a long-headed wooden mallet and the stump 
of a tree hollowed out for a mortar ; in others big wooden 
hammers are fixed on a pivot, and are raised by stepping 
on the other end of the handle, tread-mill fashion. A moun- 
tain brook, the parent of these little streams, tumbles along 
close behind the houses ; its banks are overhung with bam- 

34 



boos, and the rocks at that season were covered with clumps 
of lavender iris. From Atago-Yama, a hill just across the 
river, the view is fine ; below are the flat, gray roofs of 
Hase, and the cul-de-sac in which it lies — bordered on either 
side with green hills, its windings indicated by the curves of 
road and shining river, its green surface spotted here and 
there with gray hamlets — gradually opens out into the wider 
Yamato Valley. Unebi-Yama, which marks the site of Jim- 
mu Tenno's mausoleum, rises in the centre of the plain, and 
beyond it all is an enclosing barrier of cloudy mountains. 

A morning's jinricksha ride took me back to my old quar- 
ters at Nara, and Kwannon must have rejoiced at my de- 
parture from Hase-dera, for while I was there most of the 
priests and all the acolytes sadly neglected her: they spent 




WHITE WISTARIA, HASE-DERA 

37 



the day looking over my shoulder or gazing open-mouthed 
in my face. This was on the 9th of May, and I was glad 
to find that the wistaria in Kasuga Park was just in its 
glory. The masses of flowers turned the lower trees into 
big bouquets of pale mauve, and seemed to drip like foun- 
tains from the tall oaks and cryptomerias ; and to add to 
the beauty, all the undergrowth of andromeda had put out 
its young leaves in many shades of color ; as Chaucer says, 
" Some very red, and some a glad light green." One glade 
particularly attracted me : a tiny clear stream wound along 
through the briUiant grasses, and the trees which covered 
the steep banks on each side of this little meadow were 
completely overgrown with the vines, and smothered with 
their blossoms. This too was a quiet spot, out of the track 
of tourists and pilgrims, and it was a blessed relief to work 
without a gazing crowd ; the only passers were a few women 
and children collecting firewood or gathering the young 
fern shoots which were sprouting through the grass. These 
are cut just as they begin to unroll, and when they are 
boiled and flavored with soy, they are really quite good to 
eat, at least one thinks so in Japan. 

The wistaria blossoms were almost gone when I decided 
that though there was still plenty to be done in Nara, it 
would be better to try some new sketching -ground, and 
having heard of a tea-house with a fine old garden at Hi- 
kone, on the shore of Lake Biwa, I determined to move on 
there for my next venture. I packed all my belongings, 
and made arrangements for the journey next morning, and 
then walked once more round the park and the temples, 
gazing regretfully at all the good things which still remained 
to be sketched, and climbed Mikasa Yama, a steep grassy 
hill behind the park, which on fine days is dotted all over 
with picnic parties. From its summit there is a great view 
over the plains round Nara, with the ^ Kizugawa, a good 

38 




A TALL WISTARIA, KASUGA PARK, NARA 



broad stream, winding through them. The grassy ridges 
and the few wind-beaten pines which grow on them made a 
fine foreground, and the httle green gulUes were spotted 
with low azalea bushes covered with flame-colored flowers. 
It was too good to leave, and I ought to have unpacked 
again and prolonged my stay for a few days ; but laziness 
prevailed, the bore of repacking seemed intolerable, and to 
my lasting remorse this subject remained unpainted. 



€\ x/>':^/i 







NOTES AT MUDA 




BADGE OF THE KIKU-SUI-YA 



EARLY SUMMER IN JAPAN 




IRIS JAPONICA 



EARLY SUMMER IN JAPAN 



T is difficult nowadays to 
imagine how the Jap- 
anese managed to Uve 
without tea; everybody 
drinks it at all hours of 
the day, and the poor- 
est people rarely get a 
chance of drinking anything 
stronger, and yet it is, as things 
went in old Japan, a compara- 
tively recent introduction. Tea 
was introduced with Buddhism 
from China, and though some 
plants were brought as early 
as the ninth century, it was not 
much grown until the end of 
the twelfth. Daruma, an Ind- 
ian saint of the sixth century, 
often represented in Japanese 
art either crossing the ocean on a reed, or sitting a monu- 
ment of patience, with his hands in his sleeves, was the 
father of the tea-plant. After years of sleepless watch- 
ing and prayer he suddenly got drowsy, and at last his eye- 
lids closed and he peacefully slept. When he awoke he 
was so ashamed of this pardonable weakness that he cut 

45 




off the offending eyelids and threw them on the ground, 
wher-e they instantly took root and sprouted into the 
shrub which has ever since had power to keep the world 
awake. 

In the twelfth century Kyoto was the centre of life in 




CARRYING HOME TEA LEAVES, NEAR UJI 



Japan, and the district of Uji, between that city and Nara, 
has always kept its reputation for producing the finest tea. 
The most valuable leaves are those on the young spring 
shoots, and when I passed through on the 19th of May 
these were just being gathered and dried. Most of the 

46 



shrubs grow in the open air without any protection, ever- 
green bushes from two to three feet high, and among them 
the women and children were at work. As they squatted 
by the plants, filling their baskets, very little of them was 
visible, but their big grass hats shone in the sun, looking 
like a crop of gigantic mushrooms. The Japanese " kasa " 
is made of various light materials — straw, split bamboo, 
rushes, or shavings of deal ; it is used, like an umbrella 
tied to the head, as a protection against sun and rain ; in the 
evening or on cloudy days it is laid aside, and the laborers 
wear only their cotton kerchief, spread out like a hood, or 
tied in a band round their brows. Though it cannot be 
called the "vast hat the Graces made," it is, nevertheless, 
very effective in the landscape, and the variations of its 
outline in different positions indicate happily the action of 
its wearer. 

The plants which produce the most expensive teas, cost- 
ing from six to eight dollars a pound, are carefully pro- 




A tDt-^^-^x.s 



A PLANTATION COVERED WITH MATTING NEAR UJI 
47 



tected by mats stretched on a framework of bamboo, so 
that the tender leaves may neither be scorched by the sun 
nor torn by the heavy rains, and there are acres of them so 
enclosed. It was a curious thing to look down from a little 
hill-top on a sea of matting which filled the whole valley 
from one pine-clad hill to another, its surface only broken 
by the ends of the supporting poles and by the thatched 
roofs of the drying-houses which stuck up here and there 
like little islands. Underneath the mats women were pick- 
ing, and in every wayside cottage those who were not in the 
fields were busily sorting and cleaning the leaves. There 
are no large factories or firing-houses ; each family makes 
its own brand of tea, labelling it with some fanciful or 
poetic name, such as " jewelled dew." 

The road through this fertile district crosses two large 
rivers, the Kisugawa and Ujikawa, and many smaller 
streams. They are all carefully banked in, and the water 
is carried where it is needed by endless ditches and chan- 
nels. During the heavy rains these rivulets become raging 
torrents, and would soon cover the country with stones 
and gravel if they were not kept under control ; the quan- 
tity of debris they bring from the mountains is so great 
that, instead of being down in a hollow, they are raised 
above the rest of the country, and you have to go up-hill to 
ford them. Before getting into the long and uninteresting 
suburbs of Kyoto there are some large ponds on either side 
of the way, willows and tall reeds growing on their banks, 
and in every little creek fishermen with their boats and 
nets, all very picturesque and paintable. So was the Nesan 
at the Tatsu-ya, who when I halted for lunch at once led 
me round to the principal room at the back of the house 
(the best rooms and the gardens are usually at the back), 
and showed me her tame gold and silver carp, which came 
to be fed when she clapped her hands. It was a tiny little 

48 



garden, not more than twenty-five feet square, but it had its 
pond and bridge, and mountain of rock, and old pine-tree, 
like the best of them. 

I reached Hikone by rail the same evening, and took up 
my quarters at the Raku-raku-tei tea-house, a great ram- 
bling place, with a large garden and suites of rooms to suit 
all tastes. I was shown into a gorgeous apartment with 
gold screens, its floor raised above the level of the rest of 




THE CASTLE AT HIKONE 



the house, which no doubt was intended for great people, 
who in the old days must often have come here to see the 
Daimio, li Kamon no Kami ; but I felt I could not live up 
to this, and after viewing the rooms overlooking the lake, 
and those built on piles over the fish-pond, I selected some 
that looked out into the garden, with a trellis of wistaria 
just in front under which the purple trails of blossom near- 
ly a yard long were still hanging. There are no crowds of 

51 




THE CASTLE AT NAGOYA, FIELD OF IRIS IN THE FOREGROUND 



visitors now, and the fine old garden looks rather tangled 
and neglected, with bushes untrimmed and paths overgrown 
with weeds. On a steep rocky hill close by is the castle 
where the Daimio formerly lived ; the hill is on one side 
protected by the lake, and on the others by a wide moat, 
crossed by picturesque wooden bridges, and the roads which 
lead to the plateau at the top are defended by more bridges 
over dry moats, gate-houses, and zigzag walls of large, well- 
fitted stones. The architecture of all these castles is very 
much alike, and though there are not many of them now 
standing,, they must have abounded in the feudal times. 
The finest I saw was that at Nagoya ; it was a good deal 
shaken by the last great earthquake, but is still quite sound, 
and the great gold dolphins on its bronze roof shine high 
above the rest of the city. In the short period after the intro- 
duction of Western ideas, when the craze for things European 

52 



led to many acts of vandalism, most of them were pulled down, 
and this one at Hikone was only just saved from destruction 
by the intervention of the Emperor ; now that a reaction has 
set in, and the Japanese official mind is not so eager to for- 
get the past and obliterate its relics, they are likely to be 
carefully preserved. All of them have a massive founda- 
tion of large stones, not squared except at the angles, but 
carefully trimmed and fitted together without mortar; and 
the superstructure is of timber and plaster, with roofs and 
eaves of heavy tiles or metal. The moats, overhung with 
pines and filled with lotus during the summer months, are 
always interesting. It was a blazing hot day when I walked 




FIELDS NEAR LAKE BIWA 



up and examined the castle ; there was not a cloud in the 
sky, and Lake Biwa and its mountains lay still and clear 
and soft in the delicate blue haze which seems to be their 
own peculiar property. The fields outside the town were 
covered with a bright pink flower like a clover, which is not 
used for fodder, as there are hardly any animals to feed, but 
is dug in to improve the land for the rice, and this blaze of 
color consoled me for not finding as many azaleas as I ex- 

55 



pected. I set to work at a study of it, and sent my boy 
Matsuba, who, with the quickness of his race, quite under- 
stood the kind of thing I was looking for, to search the 
neighborhood for azalea bushes. He came back early in 
the afternoon to tell me that he had not been successful, 
but that there were some races going on in the town, so we 
wandered up, and established ourselves in a room just over 
the starting-post. The course was about two hundred and 
fifty yards along the pebbly bed of a dry river, and all the 
arrangements were very unlike those of a European race- 
course. Two upright posts of bamboo stood about five 
yards apart, with a stout pole slung between them ; the 
vicious little ponies were brought along by two grooms, 
each holding a long cord fastened to the bridle, and with a 
good deal of shoving and hustling were wedged in, shoul- 
der to shoulder, between this pole and another behind them 
at about the height of their hocks. Their heads were pulled 
over the front pole, and held firmly by a groom with a long 
running cord through the bridle rings, while the jockeys were 
fully occupied in preventing the little brutes from striking 
each other with their fore and hind legs. Meanwhile the 
spectators, who had kept at a respectful distance until the 
ponies were safely fixed, crowded up behind them, pulling 
their tails and whacking them with bamboos. The starter 
then appeared, made a few remarks, and beat a small drum, 
upon which the men in charge of the pulleys dropped the 
front pole, the grooms slipped their ropes out of the bridle 
rings and jumped aside, and the ponies scrambled off as 
best they could. The jockeys rode without saddles or stir- 
rups, with their great toes hitched into a surcingle, and di- 
rectly they were off they dropped the reins, held their left 
hands in the air, and plied their whips with the right until 
they had passed the winning-post. It was just a scurry, 
with no time for scientific riding, and, as far as I could see, 

56 



the pony who got over the pole best always won. O Kazu 
San, my waitress at the Raku-raku-tei, was helping at the 
tea-house, and kept me supplied with tea and cakes, and I 
stayed watching the races and the spectators, and being 
watched by them, until the dusk put a stop to sport. I left 
too soon, for my boy told me that there was a fight after- 
wards about a bet ; it was the only fight I heard of while I 




/il'^.ii 



O KAZU SAN 

57 



was in Japan, and I should have liked to see it. Two days 
of heavy rain turned the course into a river once more, so 
that the heats were never decided. Some few days after, 
Matsubatold me that there was a "Japanese man's circus" 
in the town. It was not in the least like a circus ; it was a 
theatrical performance in which all the members of the com- 
pany, who in this troupe were women, were mounted on 
horseback. There was a small stage, with a set scene at 
the back, and in front of it, on the same level as the spec- 
tators, a space of bare earth on which the action took place. 
The play consisted mostly of combats ; the swords and oth- 
er necessary properties were brought in by attendants, and 
placed on a high stand where they could be easily reached 
by the actors, and the horses were then led into position, 
and held there while the fighting went on. None of the 
performers fell off, but beyond this there was no horseman- 
ship ; they could not even get their steeds on and off the 
stage without the help of a groom. 

My thoughts recurred to another travelling theatre, at 
Stratford-on-Avon, where I saw a stirring drama called Tel- 
el-Kebir, or the Bombardment of Alexandria^ in which Sir 
Beauchamp Seymour had a hand-to-hand conflict with 
Arabi Pasha. Mr. Lawrence, the spirited actor - manager, 
informed me afterwards, when I congratulated him on the 
performance, that it was always popular, and that he had 
played it twenty - three times in one day at Nottingham 
"Goose-Fair. In reply to my objection that it took at least 
an hour, he said that of course they cut the dialogue, and 
only had the combats and the bombardment. I remem- 
bered, too, his remarks when called before the curtain at 
the end of his season ; he enlarged on the dignity of the 
actor's profession, and how essential it was that he should 
be a gentleman, saying, in conclusion ; " 'Ow, I harsk, could 
a chimney-sweep (if there's a chimney-sweep present I beg 

S8 



'is pardon), but 'ow could 'e act the part of a prince or a 
nobleman ? 'E could not do it, my friends ; 'e's not 'ad the 
hedjucation." 

The fine da3^s at this season were perfectly glorious ; hot 
enough to give an inkling of what it would be like in the 
full blaze of summer, and yet with a taste of spring's fresh- 
ness left in the air. They were interspersed with too many 



'.^>^^-« 




PREPARING THE RICE-FIELDS 



wet or uncertain days, but, with the garden close by, I man- 
aged to waste very little time. The first lotus leaves were 
just coming up in the ponds and the irises blossoming round 
the water's edge, the azalea bushes were covered with flow- 
ers, and the tips of the pale green maple boughs were tinged 
with rosy pink. When the pouring rain had begun to drip 
through my sketching umbrella, and I was driven indoors, 

59 



there was no lack of society. O Kazu San, a plain little 
thing with brown velvet eyes, and the rest of the girls were 
never tired of looking at my belongings, thumbing my 
sketch-books, and asking me endless questions ; and though 
I was sometimes irritable, their good-humor was unlimited. 
This unvaried good temper is itself annoying, when the for- 
eigner feels that it is not the result of sympathy, but be- 
cause he is regarded as a strange animal, not to be judged 
by the rules which govern the conduct of civilized people. 
At last Matsuba told me that he had found a place, "top 
side," with plenty of azaleas, and rooms where I could stay. 
It was a small Buddist temple called Tennenji, once very 
popular but now almost deserted, which stood on the hill- 
side beyond the rice lands, and somewhat above the swarms 
of mosquitoes which haunt the marshy shores and the la- 
goons of Lake Biwa. Ji means a Buddhist temple — at least 




::-^. 



MY ROOMS AT TENNENJ] 
60 



that is one of its meanings — and tennen means "produced 
by nature." The name itself suggested peace and quietness 
and repose, and these I found in that delightful place, always 
seen in my mind through a rosy haze of azalea blossom. 

A granite sign-post where the little temple path turns off 
from a track through the rice-fields tells all who can read 
it that the temple is dedicated to the five hundred Rakkan 
(disciples of Buddha), and their gilded and lacquered effi- 
gies sit in long tiers round one large building within the 
court-yard ; beyond this is the Hondo, where the principal 
altars are, and where the services are performed at daybreak 
by the old priest who has sole charge of the establishment. 
My room was a little annex of the Hondo, quite apart from 
the living-rooms of the family, and open on two sides to- 
the air. The angle of my veranda projected over the fish- 
pond, and on the right and the left stepping-stones led 
down from it into the garden, a small patch of level ground,, 
with a pine-clad hill-side rising sharply beyond it. Just at 
the foot of this hill there was a rocky projection, covered 
with an undergrowth of azaleas, and spotted with statues of 
Buddha and his sixteen principal followers. These were 
rudely carved of the natural stone ; with their growth of 
lichens and mosses they looked as old as the rocks them- 
selves, and were hardly to be distinguished from them at a 
little distance. Several stony zigzagging footpaths, mere 
tracks through the bushes and pine-trees, led to the top of 
the ridge, from which one looked down on fertile valleys 
enclosed by more pine-clad ridges, and to the westward on 
the great shining plain of Lake Biwa, its lagoons, islands, 
and distant mountains. Many times I walked to the top 
of this hill, sometimes in the clear brilliant moonlight, when 
the delicate pinks and reds of the azaleas were hardly visi- 
ble, and only their honeysuckle scent made me conscious of 
their presence, and when all the world would have been si- 

63 



lent but for the incessant chorus of myriads of frogs which 
came up from the rice-fields below. 

In the daytime the whole of the wood was lively with 
cicadae, who kept up a constant and irritating clatter, but 
then there was the delight of finding new flowers, or mak- 
ing the acquaintance of old garden friends in their own 
homes. A little damp gully just behind the bamboo grove 
was full of deutzia bushes in blossom, and under them grew 
a clump of pale pink lilies {Lilium krameri), which seemed 




HIKONE AND LAKE BIWA, FROM THE HILLS BEHIND TENNENJI 

to me the loveliest flowers I had ever seen. The priest at 
Tennenji was so anxious to have some of my work that I 
made a drawing of these for him ; it hangs among the tem- 
ple treasures, and may be a surprise to some wandering 
foreigner, who will little expect to find any European traces 
in such an out-of-the-way spot. The family, consisting of 
Sokin the father, O Shige San the mother, and Takaki, a 
son employed in the oflice of police at Hikone, soon 

64 




AZALEAS ON THE ROCKS, TENNENJ] 



ifr 



adopted me as a friend, and did all they 
could to make me comfortable. Takaki ^^71? , 
had received a modern education (they I/nTn J 
teach English in the Hikone schools, as ^ L 

you find out from the small boys, who j^\<> / 

shout ABC after you in the streets) ; but >o ^ 

he had not got beyond the word "Yes," / / 

beginning every sentence with it and then i--^ O-^ 
lapsing into Japanese. We made many ' ^ 

excursions together, he, Matsuba, and I, |^ 
strolling down to the town after dinner ^ 
and looking in at the theatres and shops. "^ ^ 
O Shige San was great at cooking, and ' iyjfJ vZL» 
took delight in providing me with new and /\^ ) 
strange forms of food every evening , for •^ ^ 

breakfast and lunch I ate what European / ]/nH 

food Matsuba could provide, and as flour ^ ^^ 

and whiskey could be bought, and a cow »\\^ 

was slaughtered in Hikone every Satur- ^ 

day, I did not do badly ; you can get the ' 

necessary sustenance in a shorter time on the poem 

foreign " chow," but when work was over 
and I had taken my hot bath and exchanged my suit of 
flannels for a cotton kimono, it was amusing to sit on the 
floor and speculate on the composition of the dishes which 
she brought me, trying with the aid of a dictionary to find 
out what they really were, and to acquire a taste for " dai- 



* Before I left Tennenji he wrote in one of my sketch-books the 

poem inscribed above in Japanese characters. The reading is, ' ' Yukuri 

JO midzu-umi no fukaki kokoro wa chiyomo chigiran," and it 

:)ughly translated thus : Deep as the water of Lake Biwa, my 

11 as been ever true and changeless since chance brought us 

together. 

67 



kon."* Among her successes were eels cooked in soy, 
broiled fish, and bean curd " a la brochette " ; young bam- 
boo shoots, chrysanthemum leaves fried in batter, and lily 
bulbs boiled in sugar were eatable ; but a sausage made of 
rice and herbs, and some of the quaint vegetables, were 
simply nauseous. In one of my water-colors there was a 
large group of leaves, round ones with a dark hole where 
the stem goes in, commonly known as the "foreground 
plant," and I noticed one afternoon to my disgust that 
these had been cut ; the boiled stalks were given to me at 
dinner that evening, and I never tasted anything more un- 
pleasant. When the various dishes had all been brought 
in and arranged round me by the priest or Takaki, O Shige 
San would appear and kneel in front of me, keeping my 
sake cup and rice bowl filled, and watching with intense 
anxiety my expression as I tasted each compound, and at 
the end of my dinner would remark that I had eaten noth- 
ing, and that Japan was a dirty, ugly country, to which I 
always replied that I had feasted, that England was dirty 
and ugly, but that Japan was a beautiful country. Such is 

* " Daikon " is a large kind of white radish, which is boiled and cut 
in strips and served as a savor with every meal ; it is very tough, and 
both the smell and the flavor are repulsive. A well-known Yokohama 
poet has written some verses on the subject, which show a great knowl- 
edge of culinary French, and a rooted dislike to the vegetable which is 
shared by most foreigners. It commences in this way : 
Cook loquitur (^gently). 

Won't daikon do 
To stew 

With carrots and a bean or two ? 
Methinks 'twould give a savor rare 
To cutlets a la Financiere. 
Won't daikon do? 
Master {decisively). 

No — daikon will not do ! 
68 



Oriental politeness. Then Sokin came in with his pipe 
and pouch and little fire-box, and, after taking a cup of 
sake with me, sat and smoked an.d conversed, or brought 
out the tea things of his lamented patron, li Kamon no 
Kami, and made me a bowl of powder tea with all the cor- 
rect ceremonies. The Cha-no-yu is not to be confounded 
with ordinary tea-drinking. It is an elaborate form of en- 
tertainment which cannot be appreciated by an uneducated 
foreigner- every movement is regulated by laws known to 
the initiated, and the conversation is confined to some ob- 
ject of art, or poem produced by the host. The kettle, 
water -bowl, and other utensils should all have some his- 
toric or artistic interest, and the cup from which the mixture 
is drank is usually an example of archaic pottery. The 
rules of the game have not been altered for about two 
centuries, though there are various schools which differ as 




WHITE AZALEA BUSH, RAKU-RAKU-TEI, HIKONE 
69 



to minor details — whether the whisk with which the drink 
is stirred should afterwards be laid on the seventh or thir- 
teenth seam of the matting, and things of that sort, which 
seem of infinitely small importance to the ignorant, but 
make a vast difference to the connoisseur. Our love of 
tobacco was a great bond of sympathy, although after try- 
ing each other's pipes we both preferred our own. The 
old man, who knew that I did not like to be watched while 
painting, would sit in his little room and gaze at me as I 
worked in the garden or among the stone gods on the hill- 
side, and when he saw that my pipe was out, would fill 
another for me and bring it out with a box of matches, 
making this an excuse to look over my shoulder for a few 
minutes, and to have a little conversation. 

As the summer came on and the weather got hotter the 
insects became more and more numerous ; there were 
splendid butterflies and dragon-flies in the daytime, swarms 
of fire-flies over the rice-fields at night, and unfortunately 
many others which bit at all hours, flying things, and things 
which mosquito-curtains could not keep out. The Japanese 
house has no separate rooms for living and sleeping-, 
when bedtime comes quilts are brought in and laid on the 
floor, and, if necessary, a mosquito-netting of thick green 
gauze is slung over them from the four corners of the 
apartment. The natives use a small wooden pillow, with 
a depression for the neck to rest in ; I never could man- 
age this, but after a time I succeeded in sleeping well with 
coats or another quilt rolled up for a bolster. 

Certain paragraphs about me in the local papers brought 
a good many visitors to the temple to see what I was do- 
ing, among them a gentleman who was introduced to me 
as the best singer in Hikone, and a little conversation and 
whiskey induced him to give me some specimens of his art 
— songs of the Buddhist and Shinto priests, and others 

70 



which might be described as popular airs. To foreign 
ears they were quite devoid of melody, and his elaborate 
vocalization only produced sounds which were disagreeable 
and harsh, or else ludicrously inadequate to the efforts 
they cost him. My friend, who appeared to be an all- 
round aesthete, spent a good part of the afternoon in ar- 
ranging a big bronze jar of azalea boughs and a hanging 
vase of irises, curling the leaves and snipping off any stray 
shoots which did not conform to the fish-scale arrange- 
ment (sakana no uroko no kata) which he was trying to 
make. 

The family were very busy all through this month with 
their crop of silk-worms, which required incessant care and 
feeding. I was taken to see them first in an outbuilding 
when they were just little black specks ; as they got older 
the air of this shed did not suit them, and they were moved 
into the Hondo, where they flourished and grew with as- 
tonishing rapidity under the eye of the Buddha, and de- 
voured the baskets of chopped mulberry leaves as fast as 
they could be prepared. The caterpillars were huddled to- 
gether on mats hung one above another in a framework ; a 
netting of string was spread over each mat so that the 
whole mass could be lifted and the debris cleared away 
with very little trouble. When they had ceased to grow, 
and began to stand on end, waving their heads in the air 
after the idiotic fashion of silk-worms who want to spin, 
they were picked off and put in little nests of straw or bun- 
dles of brush-wood, which soon became a mass of soft 
yellow cocoons. It was an anxious time for O Shige San, 
for a considerable part of her income depended on the 
crop of silk ; the cocoons are worth about thirty yen a 
koku, a measure rather less than live bushels. 

The pond under my veranda was full of carp and baby 
tortoises, which hurried up to be fed as soon as they saw 

73 



me leaning over the rail ; the old tortoises were more shy, 
and I only saw them on very hot days, sunning themselves 
on the stones, and they slipped into the water with a flop 
if I attempted to get near them. I caught one on a patch 
of sandy ground, after Watching its struggles to cover up 
the hole in which it had just laid some leathery-looking 
white eggs. These days brought out the snakes too, some 
of them very big, and all unpleasant to look at, but quite 
harmless. There is only one venomous snake in the coun- 
try, a small brown beast called " Mamushi " ; the other 
sorts are not ill-treated, indeed, they are considered lucky, 
but this is always killed and skinned, and a medicine is 
prepared from its dried body. 

It would have been easy to dream away months here, 
but the wise regulations of the Japanese government, 
foreseeing that the traveller might be tempted to neglect 
his duties and become a mere loafer, forced me to return 
to Kobe and get a new passport, so I had to say good-bye 
to my friends, and the Rakkan with the lichen - covered 
azaleas, still gay with crimson flowers which trailed round 
their feet, and the terrace where every evening I had 
watched the sun setting over Biwa, and to descend once 
more to the railway and the commonplace. 

The rain came down in torrents as I left the temple, and 
continued to do so all the day, but there was plenty that 
was amusing to be seen from the carriage window. The 
people were busy putting out their young rice plants, and 
the fields were full of men and w^omen working in mud 
and water half-way up to their knees, and wearing their 
"kasa" and straw coats, oiled paper, rush mats, or other 
contrivances to keep off the rain. It is surely the dirtiest 
and most laborious form of agriculture ; the work is al- 
most entirely done by manual labor with a spade and a 
heavy four-pronged rake, though I occasionally saw a cow 

74 



or a pony, with a little thatched roof on its back to shoot 
off the rain, dragging a sort of harrow through the mud. 
As soon as the spring crop of barley or rape-seed is gar- 
nered and hung up to dry, the ground is trenched with the 
spade, and water is turned over it until it has become a 
soft slush, which is worked level with the rake. The young 
rice plants, grown thick together in nursery patches, are 
pulled up when the fields are ready for planting, their roots 
are washed, and they are tied in bundles, which are thrown 
into the mud and water ; then the men and women wade 
in, untie a bundle, and set the seedlings in lines by just 
pressing them with their fingers into the mud. They do 
this wonderfully quickly, and can plant eight or nine in a 
row without moving from their places ; when the field is all 
planted it looks like a pond with a delicate green haze 
over it. The dividing banks are planted with beans or 
other vegetables, so that not a yard of ground is wasted. 
This was the i8th of June, the beginning of the " dew 
month," a period full of discorpforts for the traveller, and 
especially for the landscape-painter. 



W . 



f ^^U 






-Vj 



'Wf 






J-ra 



PLANTING RICE 




A SPRING FLOWER— JIRO-BO 



THE TIME OF THE LOTUS 




nil iy 

PLATYCODON GRANDIFLORUM, " KIKYO ' 



THE TIME OF THE LOTUS 



HE damp heat of the Jap- 
anese summer, which is so 
trying to human beings, en- 
courages all vegetation to grow 
with surprising luxuriance and 
rapidity; the buds of yesterday are 
flowers to-day, and to-morrow noth- 
ing is left but the ruin of a past 
beauty, making the painter's struggle 
most arduous just when he has least 
energy to contend with nature. The 
young bamboo shoots come up like 
giant asparagus, growing so fast that 
one can almost see them move; some 
of them are cut and eaten while 
young and tender, and those w^hich 
are allowed to grow to large poles are 
used for every imaginable purpose. 
They are made into water-pipes and flower-vases, barrel- 
hoops and umbrellas, baskets and hats, scaffolding-poles 
and pipe-stems, fans and delicate whisks for stirring the 
powdered tea — more things, in fact, than I could enumer- 
ate in a page. The bamboo is surely the cause of much 
of the clever constructive work of the Japanese; for though 
it will do most things with proper treatment, it will not 




stand being handled like ordinary timber; its peculiar 
qualities have to be considered, and every way in which 
they use it is artistic and good. This is the large species 
which grows to twenty or thirty feet high ; there are many 
dwarf kinds, which clothe the hills with green, and are 
used only for making fences and such like. 

The general aspect of Japan during the summer months 
is a harmony in greens, the dark pines and cryptomerias 
striking the lowest note of a scale which culminates in the 




AURATUM LILIES AND BOCCONIA ON THE HILLS NEAR NIKKO 
82 



brilliancy of the rice-fields — the most vivid green I know. 
There is more variety of color in those districts which are 
not irrigated, such as that round Kamakura, where the 
light sandy soil grows a great many kinds of vegetables, 
sweet-potatoes, melons, tomatoes, beans, and big patches 
of auratum and longiflorum lilies, the bulbs of which are 
exported. The lily is not one of the flowers which the 
Japanese themselves particularly admire, nor do they often 
use it for decoration. In this, as in most other matters, 
there are recognized rules of taste, and the man is con- 




SEVEN BKAUTIFUL FLOWERS OF LATE SUMMER 

1. Susuki 2. Eikjo 3. Asago 4. Shion 5. Omnia-Meshi 6. Eiku 7. 1 
Drawing by Toshoto Hario 



sidered an ignoramus who does not know the right thing to 
like. I was walking one day at Yoshida with a Japanese 
artist, a remarkable man who was engaged in making a 
series of steel-engravings, half landscape and half map, of 
the country round Fuji, and called his attention to a splen- 
did clump of pink belladonna lilies growing near an old 
gray tomb ; but he would not have them at all, said they 
were foolish flowers, and the only reason he gave me for 
not liking them was because they came up without any 
leaves. When we got back to our tea-house he took my 

8s 



pen and paper, and showed me what were the seven beau- 
tiful flowers of late summer — the convolvulus, the name of 
which in Japanese is "asago," meaning the same as our 
'' morning-glory ;" wild chrysanthemum ; yellow valerian ; 
the lespedeza, a kind of bush clover ; Platycodon grandi- 
florum, a purple-blue campanula ; Eulalia Japonica, the tall 
grass which covers so many of the hills ; and shion, a 
rather insignificant-flowered aster. I noticed that some 
versions of the seven flowers differed from his ; a large- 
flowered mallow is often substituted for the last he named. 
There are doubtless different schools which hold strong 
views on the subject, but on the morning-glory and some 
others they are evidently agreed. The auratum lily is a 
common wild flower in the hilly districts, and boiled lily 
bulbs are a favorite vegetable, but I could not find out 
which was considered the best variety for the table. O 
Shige San told me that it was a red lily ; I looked in vain 
for any of that color in their gardens. 

The cottages in the country round Kamakura are thickly 
thatched, and on the top of the thatch is laid a mass of 
earth held together by iris plants, which form a roof-crest 
of spiky green ; near them in July there often were large hy- 
drangea bushes covered with balls of blossom, the young 
flowers a pale yellow-green, changing as they grew older 
through bright blue to purple. 

On the 9th of July the heat drove me from Europeanized 
Yokohama to the hills. I left the train at Utso-no-miya, a 
little town which has been financially ruined by the railway 
— for every one formerly stayed a night there instead of 
travelling straight through — and was delighted to find my- 
self once more in thoroughly Japanese quarters. It was a 
wonderful moonlight night, and I wandered round the town 
in kimono and clogs, watched the people, and was stared 
at by them, climbed the steps to the big Shinto temple, and 

86 




HYDRANGEA BUSH, TOTSUKA, NEAR YOKOHAMA 




UNDER THE CRYPTOMERIAS AT NIKKO 



gazed over the plains flooded with pale light, and thorough- 
ly enjoyed myself. 

There is a railway now to Nikko, and most people rush 
up there without seeing the glorious avenue of cryptomerias 
— described so well in Loti's jfaponeries d'Automne — which 
line the old road for miles and miles. I sent my boy and 
my baggage by rail, and went myself in a kuruma with two 
good runners. The road is sadly out of repair in some 
places, but the splendid old trees remain, and young ones 
have been planted where winds and age have thinned their 
ranks. It is not like an ordinary avenue with the trees 
planted some yards apart ; these are so close together that 
the trunks have often joined at the base, and I noticed one 
lot of seven big trees all grown together at the bottom into 
a mass that must have been eight or ten yards long. The 

89 



road is sunk between the high banks on which the trees 
grow, and it must be gloomy enough on such a night as Loti 
experienced. Here and there it opens out into a village 
street, with abundance of refreshment booths for the pil- 
grims who still make the journey on foot. 

Nikko itself is a long, steep street, leading up to a rush- 
ing mountain torrent in a rocky ravine, which is crossed by 
two bridges side by side. One is an ordinary wooden 
structure, used by all the world ; the other, which is of red 
lacquer, with black supports and brass ornaments, is only 
opened for the Emperor and his family to pass over. Be- 
yond them the hills rise, covered with cryptomerias, among 
which are concealed the great mortuary temples of leyasu 
and lemitsu, founders of the great Tokugawa Shogunate 
that lasted for two centuries. Marvellous as these mausolea 
are, they make no effect in the distance ; it is only when 
you get close to them, wander about in their successive 
court-yards, and examine the lovely details of wood-carving, 
lacquer, and gilding, that the wonder of them strikes you. 
The tombs themselves are plain bronze pillars, and are 
reached by long flights of granite steps, green and gray with 
mosses and lichens, which lead up under the dark masses 
of foliage behind the temples. After passing through all 
the glories of color and elaborate workmanship in the pre- 
liminary temples their final peacefulness and simplicity are 
very striking. 

Nikko in the summer is full of foreign ladies and chil- 
dren ; the Emperor, too, has a country-house there, where 
some of his large family spend the hot months. I saw the 
arrival of two little princesses, with a crowd of nurses, tu- 
tors, and officials. They were funny little things, about 
three or four years old, not as pretty as most Japanese chil- 
dren, but dressed in the most gorgeous colors. The red 
lacquer bridge was opened for them, decorated with "gohei" 

QO 



— the strips of white paper which are used so largely in the 
Shinto religion — and in the middle of the bridge there was 
a little table with offerings of food on it, where the children 
stopped and made their obeisances to the manes of their 
ancestors as they passed over. All the priests of Nikko 
turned out in gauze vestments of many colors, Buddhist 
and Shinto equally anxious to do honor to the descendants 
of the gods. 

The hills are alive v;ith little tinkling streams of clear 
water, and the favorite walks mostly lead to waterfalls. I 




KIRIFURI, NEAR NIKKO 




THE MOOR NEAR YUMOTO 



spent a soaking day making a sketch of one of them — Kiii- 
furi ; the path to it crossed a wide, stony river, and went 
over grassy hills where there were abundant wild flowers, 
purple iris, white and mauve funkias, yellow orchids, clus- 
ters of white roses, pink spiraeas, hydrangeas, St.-John's- 
wort, meadow-rue, and bocconia appearing here and there, 
half hidden among the rank herbage. The big buds of 
auratum lilies showed how fine they would be in a few days' 
time. Just in front of the waterfall a little tea-house gave 
me shelter enough to work in ; but the path, up which I had 
walked dry-shod, by the time I got back had been turned 
to a raging torrent, and I only just crossed the stony river 
in time, for the light bamboo bridge was washed down dur- 
ing the night. 

Chuzenji is a little hamlet, some hours' walk from Nikko 
up a mountain road, consisting of a group of tea-houses 
which overlook a charming lake, a very sacred temple with 
a large bronze torii, and long rows of sheds to accommo- 
date the pilgrims who come in early August to make the as- 
I 94 




A WET DAY AT CHUZENJl 



cent of Nantai-zan, the mountain which rises close behind 
the village. During five long days of incessant rain I painted 
everything that was visible from my room in one of the tea- 
houses, the water of the lake rising each day so much higher 
that on the last two I was able to take a morning header 
from my balcony, and I hardly got a chance to explore the 
country round. At last a bright morning tempted me to 



i 


"^^ 


IT 

j 

1 








m 


^ ^'L.^iMmMJ 


, ^^_^^_^ 




... .. :-:^ .; ..,-.^:.::^;;^;^^^^,^^'^:^^ 


itt 


11^1*1^1 


^i^^^l0^^^f 


■ ■;\ 






- , 1 








'^-^wmlSm 


^^^^HI^^^&F"^ 


i&i«ii^- •>: 


.._ . -, .^31 


wUm 


T'W^gl^ 



THE FOOT OF NANTAI-ZAN 



walk on to Yumoto, and see the sulphur springs and the 
wide moorland, Senjo-ga-hara, which lies surrounded by 
mountain-peaks at a height of nearly five thousand feet 
above the sea. On the moor the grasses do not grow high 
enough to conceal the flowers, and I found it gay with pur- 
ple iris and white meadow-rue. The baths in Yumoto are 

open to the public ; they are large wooden tanks under 
G 97 



sheds by the road-side, and as you walk along the street 
you see the patients, men, women, and children, all sitting 
together, in a state of nature, up to their necks in the steam- 
ing malodorous soup. The clouds were gathering round 
the mountain-tops as I started to walk back to Chuzenji, 
and before I had finished a rapid sketch on the moor the 
rain began again in torrents ; the road was a series of small 
ponds, and my coolie insisted on carrying me, as well as 
my sketching materials, through them ; but he unfortunately 
stumbled under my weight, and dropped me in the deepest 
of them, and what with the wet above and below I was well 
soaked by the time I reached my tea-house. The hibachi 
seems a very inadequate means of warmth on such occa- 
sions ; a hot bath and whiskey and dry clothes are more 
effective, and after dinner a bottle of tamago-sake, a hot 
compound of whipped egg and sake, soon produces a pleas- 
ing drowsiness. Since leaving Chuzenji I have recognized 
the place in many drawings on screens and fans ; the artist 
always gives its main features — the lake, the cryptomerias, 
the huge bronze torii, and the steep wooded slope of Nan- 
tai-zan — but he combines them in one view as you never 
can see them in reality. The rain had played havoc with 
the road back to Nikko ; several bridges were down, but 
temporary ones built of fagots made it possible to cross the 
streams. All the higher woods near the lake are hung with 
gray moss, and the flowering shrubs which grow among them 
are endless — azaleas, climbing and bushy hydrangeas, wei- 
gelia, seringa, and wild vine ; on the ground I found orange 
Turk's-cap lilies, columbines, the big Lilium cordifolium, 
and ferns of many kinds. 

Notwithstanding the advantage- of cooler nights, I was 
glad to leave the green mountains, with their constant rain 
and mists, and the shut-in valleys, where it was impossible 
to see more than a few hundred yards away, and get down 



again to the broader horizons and bigger skies of the plains. 
On the journey to Tokyo I saw my first lotus flowers in a 
lake near the railway, and I hurried off at once to the pond 
which surrounds the little temple of Benten at Shiba, where 
I found them in full glory. 

The lotus is one of the most difficult plants which it has 
ever been my lot to try and paint ; the flowers are at their 
best only in the early morning, and each blossom after it 
has opened closes again before noon the first day, and on 
the second day its petals drop. The leaves are so large 
and so full of modelling that it is impossible to generalize 
them as a mass ; each one has to be carefully studied, and 
every breath of wind disturbs their delicate balance, and 
completely alters their forms. Besides this their glaucous 
surface, like that of a cabbage leaf, reflects every passing 
phase of the sky, and is constantly changing in color as 
clouds pass over. 

Japanese drawings of flowers — and they usually draw 
them beautifully — are often influenced in some way by a 
tradition. The man who invented the method was a true 
impressionist ; he seized what appeared to him character- 
istic of the plant, and insisted on that to the exclusion of 
other truths, thus founding a mannerism which all follow- 
ing artists imitated. In time, what he saw as character- 
istic became exaggerated by his disciples, who looked at 
nature only through his eyes and not with their own, and 
I have observed that the flowers which are most frequently 
drawn are not depicted so naturally as those less popu- 
lar ones, in books of botany and such like, for draw- 
ing which there is no recognized method, and where the 
draughtsman had to rely entirely on his own observation 
for his facts. Take, for example, the spots on the lotus 
stems; if you look very closely you can see that there are 
spots, but certainly they could not strike every artist as a 



marked feature of the plant, for they are not visible three 
yards away. But some master noticed them many years 
ago and spotted his stems, and now they all spot them, 
and the spots get bigger and bigger ; and so it will be until 
some original genius arises who will not be content with 
other people's eyes, but will dare to look for himself, and 
he may perhaps, without abandoning Japanese methods, 
get nearer to nature, and start a renaissance in Japanese 
art. 

The Japanese treatment of landscape is not more conven- 
tional than that of Claude or David Cox, or than the short- 
hand of our pencil-sketches, but it records its facts in a 
different way. The everlasting question in art is the imita- 
tion of nature ; it has never been carried further in certain 
directions than by Millais and his pre-Raphaelite brethren, 
or in others than by Manet, Monet, and the modern French, 
but no one can put in everything; look at a simple bunch 
of leaves in sunlight against a wall, and think how long it 
would take to really imitate all their complexities of form, 
color, and light and shade ; some facts can only be given 
by ignoring others, and the question what is the important 
thing which must be insisted on is the personal affair of 
each individual artist in every country where art is unfet- 
tered and alive. But in Japanese, as in Byzantine and 
other Eastern arts, this question is still decided by the 
practice of past generations, and it will take all the vitality 
of a strong man to infuse new life into it without destroying 
its many exquisite qualities. Perhaps when Japanese artists 
absorb its spirit instead of merely trying to imitate its 
methods. Western art may help in the direction of freedom ; 
at present I fear that its influence has done more harm than 
good. 

The people are so quick to recognize the meaning of a 
few lines, and to understand the poetic idea which they 



suggest, that it is a wonder the artists ever learned to draw 
at all ; they might have been content with symbols, for a 
few lines like those below are enough to convey all the 
poetry that is associated in their minds with any of the 
well-known art motives. 




The little island of Benten is a frequented spot, and my 
easel was surrounded from morning till night with a crowd 
of spectators ; they dispersed at the command of the police- 
man on his hourly round, but after he had gazed his fill and 
left me, a new lot instantly assembled. They were mostly 
children ; and a crowd of Japanese children is twice as 
many as any other crowd of its size, for every child has an- 
other smaller one tied to its back. I suppose they are 
not born in pairs this way, but they contract the habit of 
carrying a little one at a very early age, and often tie on a 
doll when a sufficiently small human being cannot be found. 
The spectators are almost always polite, and take care not 
to put themselves between you and your subject ; but they 
squeeze up very close to your elbow, and trample on your 
nerves, if not on your materials. They usually remarked 
that my work was a photograph ; some more educated ones 
said that it was an oil-painting, that being the medium 
which is associated with foreign art ; and one man said that 
it was enamel, which I took as a compliment to the brill- 
iancy of my color. The keeper of a little tea-shed hard by, 
where I took my lunch, noticed that I was worried by the 

103 



people standing so close to me, and when I arrived next 
morning I found that he had put up a fence round the 
place where I worked ; it was only a few slender bamboo 
sticks, with a thin string twisted from one to another, but 
not a soul attempted to come inside it. They are such an 




SPKCTATOKS 



obedient and docile race that a little string stretched across 
a road is quite enough to close the thoroughfare. It is dif- 
ficult to reconcile the character of this peaceable and pleas- 
ure-loving race which the modern traveller sees with that 

104 



which is ascribed to their forefathers — those heroes of the 
desperate wars and bloody revolutions which fill the pages 
of the early history of Japan. It may be that two centuries 
of Tokugawa rule, fatherly but autocratic, developed quali- 
ties of unreasoning obedience, and perhaps all the struggles 
of the past were merely dynastic, or affairs between the 
warriors of different clans ; perhaps the people themselves 
have always been as gentle as they are now, cultivating 
their land and pursuing their ingenious trades, little affect- 
ed by these turmoils, except that, like the producers of all 
times and countries, they were called on to supply the 
sinews of war. 

The lotus is intimately connected with Buddhism ; most 
personifications of the Buddha are represented as seated or 
standing on its flower, or holding an unexpanded bud in 
their hands; it is largely used in temple decorations, and 




THE LAST TEA LEAVES— COTTAGE NEAR YOKOHAMA 



vases with imitations. in metal of the flowers, leaves, buds, 
and seed-pods, often very exquisite in workmanship, stand 
on all the altars. It is typical to the Buddhist mind of the 
qualities of the ideal man : as it grows in the mud, yet pro- 
duces a lovely flower, it is a symbol of purity in a naughty 
world ; as its odor sweetens the air around, so his good 
deeds influence those about him ; it opens in the morning 
sunshine, and his mind is expanded by the light of knowl- 
edge ; its branchless stalks, rising without a break to the 
leaf or flower, are a type of his single - mindedness and 
directness of purpose; and its edible root shows that the 
basis of his life must be usefulness to others. To this I 
may add that, like the very good, the flower always dies 
young. It is lovely enough in itself without all this halo 
of virtue. Hardy says of Tess, " Beauty to her, as to all 
who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing 
symbolized " ; this is unavoidable with most of us, and 
the suggestion of feelings and memories of our own does 
not necessarily obscure our visual sense ; but a fixed and 
recognized suggestion is the result of mental laziness, and 
may lead to the ignoring of intrinsic beauty ; as our lovely 
primrose is to some eyes a political badge, admired only 
because of its association with a name and a faction, or 
rejected for the same cause. To quote Mr. Punch, 

' ' A primrose by the river's brim 
A party emblem was to him, 
And it was nothing more." 

But the lotus has not sunk so low as this ; though it has 
been adopted by the Buddhists, it excites no animosity in 
Shinto breasts ; and where temples under the present 
regime have been handed over from the one religion to the 
other, though the pagoda and other distinctively Buddhist 

1 06 



structures are pulled down, the lotus-ponds are left in their 
beauty. The largest I saw were those connected with the 
great Hachinian temple at Kamakura, which has been 
turned over to the state religion ; they cover several acres, 
and the flowers in them are of three colors — either white, 
bright rose, or a delicate shell-like pink. All three varie- 
ties seem to grow equally freely, and one is as lovely as 
the other. The white one has been specially adopted by 




LOTUS-PATCH AMONG THE RICE-FIELDS, KAWASAKI, TOKYO 



the followers of Nichiren, a noisy sect which beats a drum 
during the long hours of prayer, and it is this variety, too, 
which is usually grown in patches here and there among 
the rice-fields for the sake of its roots. They have not 
much flavor, except that of the sugar with which they are 
boiled, but they are crisp in texture and pleasant to munch. 
The children are very fond of the nutlike seeds which are 

109 




A TEA-HOUSE AT KAMAKURA 



embedded in the fleshy seed-pod ; it looks very like the 
rose of a watering-pot. In the tea-booths round the tem- 
ple of Benten they use a dried slice of this pod for a mat 
on which to stand the cup or bowl. 

Kamakura was for a long time the capital of Japan ; in 
the twelfth century it was selected for his headquarters by 
Yoritomo, the great warrior whose victories enabled him to 
take the reins into his own hands, and to establish that 
system of military government which only ended with the 
deposition" of the last Shogun in 1868. But when a rival 
family defeated his successors they removed the seat of 
government, and Kamakura rapidly declined from a great 
city of more than a million inhabitants to the insignificant 
fishing-village which it now is, with nothing to show of its 
former greatness but this temple of Hachiman, and the 
Daibutsu, an enormous bronze Buddha, not only remark- 



able for its size, but also for being the finest and most 
dignified production which the art of Japan can show. 
The temple buildings which once sheltered it were de- 
stroyed ages ago, and the image is now in the open air, in 
one of the little valleys which branch out from the plain 
and run back among the pine-clad hills. Centuries of ex- 
posure to rain and sun have given varied colors to the great 
bronze god. He is seated cross-legged on a lotus-flower, 
his hands folded in his lap; the head is bent slightly for- 
ward, and his face gazes down with an expression of calm 
superiority which can only come from perfected wisdom 
and subjugated passions. A new shrine to Yoritomo's 
memory, all of black and gold, stands near one of the 
lotus-ponds ; in front of it are some splendid old willow- 
trees, which he is said to have planted, and under which 
he sat and composed poetry when he was not engaged 
more actively in fighting. It is hardly possible that these 
willows can have lived to such a great age ; they are prob- 
ably descendants of the original trees. Behind the shrine 
is a large modern barrack, and I saw bands of white-clad 
recruits, with side-arms and repeating rifles, trousers, tu- 




YORITOMO'S WILLOWS AND HIS SHRINE 
III 



nics, and forage-caps, quite European in everything but 
face and stature, constantly passing to and fro over the 
ground where the old warrior must have seen his quaint 
soldiers in lacquered armor and bronze helmets carrying 
their long - bows and queer - shaped halberds. One day 
when I was painting the willows my boy Matsuba, who 
had plenty of spare time for investigating the neighbor- 
hood while waiting to carry home my umbrella and things, 
came and told me that there was a wrestling-match at a 
small temple about a mile away. I packed up at once and 
we walked over there, for I was very anxious to see what 
kind of a sport it was. This was a tournament, and all 
the professional wrestlers of the neighborhood, and many 
youths anxious to distinguish themselves, had collected to 
take part in it. They were divided into three classes. The 
masters of the art were all past their first youth ; not enor- 
mously stout, as they are often represented in drawings 
and carvings, but fine, athletic men, taller than the average 
of Japanese. They wore their hair in the ancient style, 
shaved away from the centre of the head, and the locks 
fi-om the back and side made into a queue, turned up and 
knotted with a string on the top of the poll ; they had no 
clothes except a loin-cloth and an embroidered apron. In 
the second class were men who had won but few prizes ; 
they were not all in the professional get-up, and some of 
them were evidently laboring-men with a taste for sport. 
The third class was composed of youths, none of them 
more than nineteen or twenty years old. The contests 
took place in the temple court-yard on a circular bed of 
sand, under a roof supported by wooden pillars, but not 
enclosed at the sides ; round the edge of this raised circle 
there was laid a straw rope, and the man won who could 
either fairly throw his opponent or force him across the rope 
without being dragged over himself. The proceedings were 



conducted by a Shinto priest in full dress, wide trousers, and 
a coat sticking out from the shoulders like that of a modern 
young lady, who with a peculiar-shaped fan gave the signal 
to begin and to stop. For the highest class this umpire 
was a venerable old gentleman ; for the others the place 
was taken by young priests who needed to learn this part 
of their business. The wrestlers came on in pairs as their 
names w^ere called, and after a great deal of marching round, 
stamping, rubbing their limbs, making gestures of defiance, 
and so on, they squatted opposite each other. When the 




JAPANESE WRESTLERS 



signal was given to begin they rested their fingers on the 
ground between their knees, and leaned towards each other 
till their foreheads touched, sometimes waiting several min- 
utes before attempting to make any grip. If the grip 
seemed unfair or unsatisfactory to one of the opponents, 
he immediately put down his hands, the priest stopped the 
bout, and all the preliminary business had to be gone 
through again ; but if it seemed all right the struggle be- 
gan, and sometimes lasted for five minutes, each man strain- 
H 113 



ing every muscle in a splendid way, and using all the sci- 
ence and cunning he knew. If it lasted too long without 
either man gaining any advantage, the priest signalled to 
them to stop, and they had to wait till their turn came round 
again. The preceding rough sketch, made while jammed in 
the crowd of spectators, will give some idea of the attitude 
of the men waiting for the fan to be lowered. Everything 
was conducted in the most ceremonious and orderly manner, 
and there was no drunkenness or rowdyism, although the 
multitudes who had assembled were entirely of the poorest 
class. The most fashionable wrestling-matches are held 
in Tokyo in spring and autumn, and the champion is as 
much a popular favorite as a famous torero in Spain, or a 
well-known prize-fighter in England and America. 

Those who read these notes will have gathered that the 
heat and the rain make summer life in Japan not wholly 
enjoyable ; let me also say some words of warning to the 
thin-skinned against the mosquitoes, and even more against 
a horrible little insect which lives in the grass or sand and 
bites your legs and feet. It is so small that I never suc- 
ceeded in finding it, but its bite brings up a blister. which 
breaks and leaves troublesome sores. There were few 
nights from June till October when I was not obliged to 
get up once or twice and bathe them in cold water to allay 
the intolerable itching. The sea, too, has its terrors. I 
went down to the shore near Kamakura one hot night, 
hoping that a swim would soothe my troubled skin, but 
no sooner had I plunged into the approaching wave than 
my neck and arms were embraced by jelly-fish, and I 
scrambled out feeling and looking as if I had taken my 
bath in a bed of nettles. The Japanese, although they 
grumble and fan themselves a good deal, do not really 
mind the heat ; their draughty houses are admirably adapt- 
ed for fine summer weather, and their clothing is sensible 

114 



and scanty. But the foreigners suffer, and as September 
comes, and the lotus flowers fade, they hail with relief the 
approach of the cooler and dryer weather of autumn. 




LESPEDEZA " HAGI 




THE HEART-LEAVED LILY 



FUJISAN 




,^^ 



CAMPANULAS ON FUJI 



FUJISAN 




HE great mountain of Japan 
is well known to us all ; its 
form appears on countless 
screens and fans, and its for- 
eign name, Fusiyama, is as 
familiar as Mont Blanc or 
Pike's Peak. By the Japanese 
it is called Fuji, or Fujisan, 
or sometimes Fuji-noyama when 
speaking poetically: it is difficult 
to understand how an s came to 
be substituted for the / by for- 
eigners, but under any name 
there is a peculiar fascination 
about the mountain, and the first 
sight of it, from the hundred 
steps in Yokohama, from Ueno 
m Tokyo through a haze of tele- 
phone wires, or across the waves 
of Suruga Bay from the deck of 
a steamer, is an event which will 
be fixed in the traveller's mem- 
ory 

I can never see a high place 
without wishing to be on the 
119 



top of it, and Fuji looks obtrusively high. The long 
sweep with which it heaves its twelve thousand feet above 
the shore, the absence of any competitive mountains, and 
the exaggerated perspective of its broad base and narrow 
summit, all add to this impression, and the ambitious soul 
longs to be on such a superior eminence. And there is no 
better way of taking a holiday than to climb a mountain. 
To go down a river leads to laziness ; things glide by which 
look as if they ought to be sketched, but to do so would in- 
volve stopping the boat, and interfering with the forces of 
nature which are gently furthering the traveller's ends, and 
thus the mind is tossed to and fro between the delight of 
seeing things and the unpleasant feeling that it is a duty to 
work. Thinking is the one thing to be especially avoided 
on a holiday, and there is too much time for thinking on an 
ordinary river. The same objection holds against walking 
on easy roads ; in fact, the farther you walk the more you 
think ; but in climbing a really big hill all thought is killed 
for hours by the simple physical exertion, and you become 
a mere machine, with a laboriously pumping heart and very 
heavy legs. And what a sense of superiority comes when 
the highest point is at last reached, when the world is all 
below you, half cloud and half solid earth, lovely, myste- 
rious, and absolutely unpaintable. Even this sense fades 
from me in a few minutes, and I become a nonentity, with 
only a vague feeling of the hugeness of the universe and 
the infinitesimal smallness of the individual, and the open- 
ing verse of Adam's morning hymn always comes into my 
mind, as it did years ago on the top of a Somersetshire hill 
overlooking the Glastonbury fiats, just after my first read- 
ing of " Paradise Lost." 

An artist often hears the remark, " You must find paint- 
ing a great resource," as if it were an amusement like golf 
or trout-fishing ; and no doubt to many people a landscape- 



painter's life seems like one long holiday ; but the struggle 
with ever-changing skies and fast-fading flowers has its 
fatigues, and the mind gets wearied of constantly thinking 
how this and that ought to be painted, so when a friend in 
Yokohama suggested that we should go up Fuji together, I 
accepted his proposal with alacrity, and we chose the first 
week in August for our excursion, that being the time when 
there is the best chance of good weather, and when most 
pilgrims are to be seen on the mountain. One of the most 
boring things in life is to walk through new and interest- 
ing country with a man who has no eyes for anything but 
his watch, and who insists on telling you how many minutes 
the last mile has taken ; but my friend's figure was a suffi- 
cient guarantee against any attempt at "record-cutting,'* 




GOING UP IN THE MIST 



and I felt sure that his pace would give me plenty of time 
for looking about. 

The weather for our start was not promising — that damp 
summer heat of which there is so much in Japan, heavy and 
depressing, shrouding the mountains from morning till night 
in dense masses of cloud, which seem to slowly drag them- 
selves up from the valley, and never succeed in getting 
clear of the hill-tops. From Miya-no-shita to the Hakone 
Lake we were from time to time enveloped in these clouds, 
and a thin drizzling rain prevented us from enjoying what 
in fine weather would be a very lovely walk. The moor at 
the northern end of the lake, Sengoku-hara, is dotted with 
herds of cattle, and is perhaps the only place in Japan 
where this familiar sight can be seen. You may wander for 
miles over the green hills and moorlands which cover so 
large a portion of its surface without ever seeing a four- 
footed animal ; perhaps because the tall, coarse grasses and 
the leaves of the dwarf bamboos are unsuitable for fodder ; 
perhaps because the Japanese are not a meat-eating nation, 
and do not need herds and flocks. 

Our intention was to cross this moor, and join the road 
which leads from Miya-no-shita by way of the Maiden's 
Pass, Otome-no-toge, to Gotemba, a village at the foot of 
Fuji, but our coolie assured us that he knew a shorter road 
by the Nagao-toge, so we struggled up the hill-side on our 
left, reached a post which marked the top of the pass, and 
then stopped in the mist to consider which track we should 
follow. Suddenly appeared to us an aged man, whose ven- 
erable face inspired us with confidence, and by him we 
were led astray. He took us by the semblance of a path 
along the hill-top, and for about half an hour we plunged 
through wet grass up to our necks, the thick white mist 
hiding everything more than ten yards distant ; then he 
confessed that he had lost his way, that he had heard of 




A CLOUDY EVENING, FROM THE SANDS OF TAGO-NO-URA 



that road, but had never taken it before, and that it was all 
grown over — an obvious fact; so there was nothing to be 
done but find our way back to the post, and try the wider 
track from which he had beguiled us. He was a cheerful 
old soul, seventy-four years of age, who had just walked to 
some hot springs about twenty miles from his home to take 
the baths for a couple of days because he suffered from 
rheumatism. Either it was a very mild case or the baths 
were marvellously efficacious, for he led us down the hill at 
a rattling pace, and went five or six miles out of his way to 
atone for his error, and to put us in the right road for Go- 
temba. 

The mists reached far down the hill, and when we were 
at last free from them we looked eagerly for Fuji. There 
was the sea below us, with the great curve of sand, Tago- 
no-ura, bordering Suruga Bay, and the green slopes rising 
from it showed where our mountain must be, but at the 

123 



height of about two thousand feet a straight bank of white 
cloud ruled off the landscape, and of the summit we could 
see no sign. The path led us along the hill-side, where 
men were cutting the rough grass, and loading it on pack- 
horses ; it wandered in and out of the dry gulleys, and over 
the intervening ridges, and at last, descending to the north- 
ward, brought us through cultivated fields to a tea-house 
near the railway station, where our baggage and provisions 
were waiting for us. Gotemba is on the Tokaido Railway, 




FUJI FROM THE ABEKAWA, AND THE TOKAIDO BRIDGE 



and is therefore a much-frequented place during the six 
weeks or so when Fuji is considered to be " open." It 
has been ascended at all seasons, the laborious walking 
through soft snow being the only difficulty, and the chance 
of bad weather the only danger ; but except from the latter 
part of July to the beginning of September the numerous 
rest-houses are unoccupied, and the climber is obliged to 
carry all provisions with him. 

124 



There were plenty of pilgrims about, waiting to start on 
the morrow or just returned from the mountain, some wash- 
ing their weary feet, others tying their big hats and long 
walking-sticks in bundles for the luggage-van, and all chat- 
tering incessantly. After dinner a travelling company en- 
tertained us in front of our tea-house with songs and dances. 
The band consisted of two samisen, a bell tapped with a 
stick, and bamboo castanets. The dancers were all little 
girls, from ten to fifteen years old, dressed in the ordinary 
long-sleeved kimono, and the movements of their bodies 
and slim little hands and limbs were full of grace and vari- 
ety. Each performance was a mixture of song, dance, and 
dialogue, with instrumental accompaniment ; the music was 
queer, tuneless, and often harsh to the European ear, but 
with the blood-stirring quality of all genuine national music. 

Before daybreak next morning the whole house was stir- 
ring, and it was useless to hope for more sleep. Most of 
the pilgrims start early in order to get to the top by sunset, 
sleep there, and descend the following day, but we had de- 
cided to sleep two nights on the mountain, and were in no 
hurry. Our heavier baggage was sent by pack-horse to 
Yoshida, on the north side of the mountain, and three cool- 
ies went with us as guides and porters, carrying some extra 
clothing and the solid food which seems necessary for Euro- 
pean stomachs. In the village street our strolling players 
were already wandering round, trying with some prelimi- 
nary chords on the samisen to attract an audience. Day- 
light did not suit them, they looked draggled and discour- 
aged, and it was difficult to believe that those dirty little 
■figures shuffling along in the mud could ever have had any 
charm or grace of movement. 

The path from Gotemba to the summit is one steady 
ascent over beds of old ashes. At first it is a very gentle 
rise; the lanes wind through the fields with various crops, 

125 




ON THE NORTHERN SLOPE OF FUJI— GRASS-CUTTERS RETURNING 



and past cottages with hedges of pink and white hibiscus ; 
but after a few miles it begins to get steeper, the ashes are 
less disintegrated, cultivation only appears in isolated spots, 
and there are large stretches of gray moorland varied only 
with bushes and wild-flowers. The mist still hung round 
us, there was no landscape to be seen in any direction, and 
if it had not been for the flowers and the ever-new and 
quaint figures on the road, this part of the walk would have 
been dull. Besides the regular pilgrims there w^re many 
men and women leading pack-horses, those on their way 
up carrying provisions and fuel for the rest-houses, and 
those coming down bringing bundles of grass so large that 
they looked like walking hay-stacks, and the wiry little po- 
nies that carried them were almost invisible. In front a 
misshapen head peeped out, underneath were four thin 
little legs with enormous feet, and as they passed, their 
narrow drooping quarters, cat -hammed and cow -hocked, 
swayed at every step under the heavy load. Japanese 
drawings of horses have risen in my estimation since I 

126 



have seen the models the artists have to work from ; there 
never was a more ill-shaped beast than the ordinary horse 
of the country. In this as in many other hill districts 
mares only are used ; they are shod with big straw over- 
shoes, which give a finishing touch to their ludicrous shape ; 
under them is slung a square of dark-blue cotton cloth to 
keep off the flies, and a narrow strip of the same material, 
with a big crimson cord and tassel printed on it for deco- 
ration, is draped across their quarters. Many of the pil- 
grims ride up as far as the tea-house called Uma-gaeshi 
(horse send back), and the ponies look almost as much 
eclipsed under the big pack-saddle with its trappings, and 
the pilgrim with his, as they do under the loads of grass. 

When all cultivation had disappeared, and the road was 
a mere cinder track over a moorland of ashes, the flowers 
and bushes still grew in clusters here and there. The most 
abundant plant was a large bushy knotweed covered with 
sprays of white blossoms, and this grew far up the moun- 
tain-side. There were also clumps of tall bocconia, a cam- 
panula with large pink or lavender flowers sprinkled in each 
bell with tiny ink-spots, and various less showy flowers. 
The flora on this side of the mountain, devastated by the 
last eruption, in 1706, is not so rich as that on the northern 
slope. As the ascent became steeper we got into a wood 
of dwarfed and scraggy pine-trees, which extended as far as 
Tarobo, a large tea-house with a little temple attached, and 
then suddenly ceased ; above this there was only an occa- 
sional dead stump to break the monotonous surface of ashes. 
Here every pilgrim purchases a stick to help him up the 
mountain — an octagonal staff of birch, about five feet long, 
with an inscription burned on it, and for a few coppers the 
priests on duty at the summit will add a red stamp to prove 
th-at the owner has actually been there. 

We reached the second shelter beyond Tarobo quite early 

127 



in the afternoon ; great masses of wet mist came constantly 
driving up the mountain-side ; there was plenty of room in 
the hut, and nothing to be gained by going higher, so we 
decided to stay there for the night. All the regular tracks 
up Fuji are divided into ten portions, and a rest-house is 
supposed to mark the end of each division ; but they vary- 
much in their accommodation for travellers, and often get 
destroyed during the winter, so it is well to find out before 
starting which are habitable and which are not. Number 
Two (Ni-go-me), on the Gotemba path, was a roomy hut, 
built with blocks of lava ; from below it looked like a wall 
with a hole in it, from above it was not visible, for the ashes 
covering its roof of rough planks were simply a continua- 
tion of the mountain slope ; there was no chimney, but a 
mass of snow was piled over the fireplace, which dripped 
through the roof into a tub and supplied the establishment 
with water. By each shelter a small white flag fluttered on 
a pole to make its situation obvious. 

Nothing could be more dreary than this spot on such an 
afternoon : above, below, and on each side the waste of 







THE SECOND SHELTER IN THE GOTAMBA PATH 
128 



purple-gray ashes, light-green spots of knotweed and this- 
tle, only enforcing the gloom of its color, seemed to stretch 
interminably into the mist, and nothing broke the monoto- 
ny of the long oblique line except the little eminence of 
Hoei-zan, sticking up like a pimple on the great slope of 
Fuji, which occasionally showed its outline through the 
vague and formless clouds. 

Inside it was, at any rate, warm ; the raised floor was cov- 
ered with coarse matting, and on this quilts were spread, 
and soon after dark we were all in bed. Some later arrivals 
had added to our numbers, and we slept thirteen in that hut, 
including the host and hostess ; but this was nothing to the 
crowd at the top, where I think we were nineteen, perhaps 
more, for in some parts of the floor there must have been 
two or three under a quilt, and it was difficult to count 
them. Even here on Fuji you do not escape the all-seeing 
eye of the Japanese police ; your passport is examined by 
the keepers of the hut, and is copied into a book which 
gives every night the names and addresses of those who 
sleep under the roof. About two o'clock in the morning 
we were wakened by our host, who took us outside, and 
there at last was Fuji itself, straight over our heads, every 
detail softened, but clearly visible, and the summit looking 
ridiculously near in the brilliant moonlight. Below us was 
the slope of ashes and the moorland over which we had 
walked ; and in the distance the Hakone Mountains, already 
far below our level, lay half hidden by masses of moonlit 
cloud. More energetic men might have started at once for 
the final climb, but after gazing and shivering for a few 
minutes we turned into our hard beds again, and it was not 
till after sunrise that we left our hut, our party increased by 
a dreary and footsore young soldier in a soiled white uni- 
form, and a cheerful coolie, carrying about a hundred- 
weight of planks to repair one of the higher shelters. 
I 129 



The path goes zigzagging up to one rest-house after an- 
other, and there was not one of them which we failed to 
patronize ; even Number Seven, which was a heap of ruins 
with nothing in the way of drink but a tub of melted snow, 
was an excuse for a few minutes' halt. In the clear morning 
sunlight Fuji looked small, as most mountains do when 
there are no clouds to give mystery and suggest height ; 
but it was a grand morning for distant views, and the sun- 
shine brought out vividly the strange and brilliant colors of 
the various materials which form the mountain — gray ashes, 
blue lava, and the reds and oranges of burned earth. 

Above the seventh station the path turns to the left and 
passes behind Hoei-zan ; already bands of pilgrims, who 
had seen the sunrise from the summit, were making their 
way back towards Gotemba, going at a great pace down the 
glissade of loose sand and ashes on its side, while we toiled 
on over harder cinders, with an occasional ridge of lava, on 
the upward path. At this altitude the knotweed and this- 
tles had disappeared, and the only plants I saw were a dwarf 




FUJI WITH ITS CAP ON 
130 



sedge and a little starwort in some of the sheltered nooks ; 
higher still only a few lichens and mosses can grow ; there 
is no regular alpine flora on Fuji. 

A big gully full of snow lies just below Number Eight, 
and from this point the ascent is steeper than ever, winding 
among a chaos of shapeless blocks of lava; a sharp spur 




FUJI FROM THE KAWAGUCHI LAKE 

on our left crowned with them made a most curious outline 
against the sky. In front of us was a strange pilgrim, an 
old and feeble Buddhist priest in canonicals and a big cane 
hat ; two coolies were hauling him by a cord round his 
waist, and another was pushing from behind, and even with 
this help he had to stop every few minutes to get his wind. 
Pie smiled a sickly smile as we went by ; he was even slow- 
er than we were, and it seemed cruel to pass him ; but he 
got to the top finally. 

A sharp pull up a rocky gully at last brought us to a little 
wooden torii, and to the " Famous Silver Water," a clear, 
cold spring on the edge of the crater. The supply is not 

131 



large, and the priest in charge of the enclosure doles it out 
to pilgrims at the rate of one brass cash for a small teacup- 
ful. The principal temple, and the cluster of huts round it, 
form a little square on the south side of the crater, just at 
the top of the Mura-yama path, and are reached from the 
Silver Water by means of a couple of ladders and a small 
fee. At the top of the ladders there is a tiny shrine, serv- 
ing as stable to a toy model of a horse, and in front of 
this the coppers are deposited. There are only three en- 
trances to the crater of Fuji, and each of these is marked 
by a small torii, the sacred gateway of the Shinto religion ; 
two of them I have already mentioned, the third is on the 
north side, where the paths from Yoshida and Subashiri, 
which meet at Number Eight station, reach the summit. 

Clouds had, as usual, begun to form about mid-day, and 
there were only occasional peeps of distance, but the crater 
itself was worthy of the journey, and occupied us until the 
bitterly cold wind drove us to shelter. Here, as on other 
mountains, I noticed that the first object of the native is to 
get under cover; all the kingdoms of the world and the 
glory of them may be spread before his eyes, but if there 
is a little smoky cabin, however rough and uncomfortable, 
the professional mountaineer goes inside and stays there. 
This one was not luxurious ; near the doorway, the only 
aperture for admitting light, there was a smouldering wood- 
fire, where our food was cooked before we lay down to try 
and rest on the loose and creaky floor-boards ; little blasts 
came like squirts of cold water through the cracks of the 
unmortared walls, and it was a relief when a general move- 
ment of the sleepers — for a Japanese can apparently sleep 
anywhere — showed the approach of sunrise. 

The morning was clear and bright, and we all crouched 
in nooks of the rocks, wrapped in our quilts, and gazed at 
the straight gray line of the Pacific and the gradually 

132 



brightening line above it, watching for the first sign of the 
approaching god. On the most prominent rock a priest 
knelt, waving strips of paper tied to a stick and chanting 
prayers and eulogies, and soon the sun rose, as he assuredly 
will every morning, whether he is prayed to or not. There 




FROM THE TOP OF FUJI, LOOKING NORTH 



was such a vast space of mysterious blue sea and distance 
below the horizon that the big orange ball appeared to be 
already half-way up the heavens when we first saw it. This 
daily occurrence seems ever new and wonderful, always has 
something of the miraculous about it, and to most minds it 

133 



brings a sense of thankfulness, as the sunset gives that of 
repose ; though why we should feel grateful both that it is 
time to begin to work and time to leave off is a puzzle to 
me. My thoughts turned to an early morning near Plevna, 
and to an honest Turk, who, as the sun rose over the bare 
Bulgarian hills, turned on his box-seat, and, gravely touch- 
ing his forehead, -fished a good-day to his " little brothers " 
in the carriage he was driving. There was a mixture of 
courteousness and solemnity in his manner which seemed 
exactly suited to the important moment. 

When the orange glow had turned to a dazzling glare, we 
walked round to the foot of Kenga-mine, the highest of the 
peaks encircling the crater, and looked westward at the 
shadow of Fuji, a great pyramid of tender blue stretching 
for miles across the country at its foot, darkening a slice of 
the sunlit distant mountains, and towering above them into 
the sky, clearly defined on the light mists and clouds of the 
horizon. So sharp was the outline that it seemed as if our 
two shadows ought to show on the distant sky ; but though 
we waved our arms frantically there was no visible move- 
ment on the edge ^ we were too small. When we returned 
to get some breakfast many of the pilgrims were saying 
their morning prayers at the little temple. " Sengen Sama" 
is the goddess of Fuji ; a prettier name for her is " Ko no 
hana saku ya Hime " — " the princess who makes the blos- 
soms of the trees to open." There is another little temple 
dedicated to her on the north side of the crater, and many 
more imposing ones in various parts of Japan, On a 
banner which floated in front of this second temple there 
was an inscription in Japanese, and under it these words in 
English, " Place for worship the Heaven." I suppose this 
was an effort in the direction of civilization and rational- 
ism, but I resented it as an attempt to explain away the 
flower-loving princess, and to dethrone her from the moun- 

134 



lain -top where she has been worshipped in peace for so 
many centuries. Close by the banner is another spring, 
" The Famous Golden Water," and a small shed, where 
bundles of chopsticks and other mementos are sold, and 
where for ten sen you can buy a tin can full of the famous 
water to take home to your friends. Most of the descend- 
ing pilgrims have one or two of these tins slung round 
them with the rest of their travelling-kit. The regular Fuji 
pilgrim is dressed in a white tunic with loose sleeves, close- 
fitting white cotton drawers, white socks and gaiters, and a 
pair of straw sandals ; he wears the usual big hat, which 
serves as an umbrella, and slung round his shoulders he 
has a light rush mat, which can be shifted to either side to 
keep off sun or rain. Round his neck he has a string of 
beads, a little incessantly tinkling bell, and a few pairs of 
extra sandals on a cord, and fastened to his waistband is 
the small package containing his personal baggage ; he 
carries in his hand either the octagonal birch staff or a 



■^^'.iBftcC^ij^'r/- 








THE GREAT PALM AT RYUGEJI, FUJI IN THE DISTANCE 

I3S 




THE CRATER OF FUJI 



longer peeled wand, with some paper tied round the end 
of it. The dress of the women is the same as that of the 
men, except that they wear a short petticoat under the 
tunic, about as long as a Highlander's kilt. I saw none of 
them adorned with the bell and beads, so perhaps these 
are reserved for the men. It is only of late years that 
women have been allowed to climb the sacred mountain. 

No one point of the crater's edge is high enough to give 
a panorama ; you have to walk all round, about two miles, 

136 



in order to see the view on every side. Eas'tward is the 
country round Yokohama and Tokyo, with the Pacific be- 
yond as horizon ; southward, too, is the ocean, with the Izu 
Peninsula jutting out into it, and the sweep of Suruga Bay 
bringing it close under your feet ; westward you get a 
glimpse of the Fujikawa River, with range after range of 
mountains behind it; and to the northward a chain of little 
lakes lies at the base of Fuji, these, too, backed up by moun- 
tains, which rise, one behind another, as far as you can see. 

In some places the outer wall descends abruptly into the 
crater ; in others, as by the Golden Water, there is a nar- 
row plateau between the two. The crater itself is four or 
five hundred feet deep, the north side mostly precipitous 
rock, and the south side, under Kenga-mine, a steep slope 
of snow and debris ; all the peaks round it have names, 
and one of them near the Silver Water is dotted with cairns 
raised in honor of Jizd, the patron saint of travellers, who 
helps little children to cross the Buddhist Styx. There is 
a rough path all round the crater, leading over some of the 
peaks, inside some, and outside others, which is kept in 
passable condition by men who collect a few coppers for 
their labor : the pilgrim season is harvest-time for the dwell- 
ers round Fuji, and its barren top pays well for cultivation. 

It was after ten o'clock before we had made the circuit 
and seen all the sights ; we met our coolies by the long row 
of huts at the top of the Yoshida path, and could see the 
village itself, our destination, lying in the blue hollow 
below us. Groups of ascending and descending pilgrims 
were visible for a long distance on the slope ; as we looked 
down on them we saw only big round hats with an arm 
sticking out, and two little feet working underneath. After 
a final cup of tea at one of the guest-houses we passed 
under the wooden torii, and began the descent, a very steep 
and stony one, the loose cinders and lumps of lava requir- 

137 



ing attention at every footstep. At Number Nine station 
there is a little shrine called " Sengen's Welcome," and at 
Number Eight there are six or eight good-sized huts built 
on a spur of harder lava, making quite a little village, 
which can be seen on a clear morning from the foot of 
the mountain. Here the Subashiri route branches off to 
the right ; ours to Yoshida turned to the left, and we went 
sliding with long strides down an incline of loose ashes 
and sand, into which our legs sank up to the knee at every 
step. It was rapid but fatiguing, and required very high 
stepping to avoid heavy and ignominious falls. The track is 
marked by hundreds of cast-off " waraji " — straw sandals — 
a. common object on all Japanese roads, but here especially 
plentiful. My companion had provided himself in Yoko- 
hama with a stock of them, specially made to fit over the 
European boot; they were carefully adjusted and tied on 
by our servants and porters, but I noticed that after the 
first hundred yards they had always worked loose, and 
after a quarter of a mile they were hanging gracefully round 
his ankles instead of protecting his feet. The enjoyment 
of walking depends so much upon foot-gear that I am shy 
of trying experiments, and I found that my stout boots with 
plenty of nails served as well on Fuji as on any other 
mountain. Worn as Japanese wear them, with a thong 
passing between the big toe and the next, the waraji hold 
on well ; they are soon worn out, or made useless by the 
breaking of one of the strings of twisted grass which tie 
them to the ankles ; but this does not matter, for new ones 
can be bought for about a half-penny at any road-side house. 
This part of Fuji was very desolate, the rocks were form- 
less blocks piled up without any arrangement of line, and 
the de'bris was too loose for any plant to find a foothold; 
but after a few thousand feet a ridge of more solid lava 
rose on each side of the gully we were descending, and 

138 




m<. '7 









%^ 





ri*' -^^-s 






AN OLD RED PINE AT YOSHIDO 



that on our left soon began to show some vegetation. 
There were pines and larches, whose dwarfed and twisted 
forms showed the hardship of their lives, and among them 
were some flowers too, clusters of a delicate pink rhodo- 
dendron, crimson wild roses, columbines, clematis, golden- 
rod, and orange lilies. 

The glissade of fine ashes brought us down as far as 
Number Five station, and there we rejoined the upward 
path, for no one tries to ascend over this loose stuff. 
High up in the gully we had seen men digging out snow 
from under the ashes, and taking it across the flank of 
the mountain to supply one of the rest-houses on the ridge 
to our right, and troops of ascending pilgrims were visible 
now and then as a turn of their path brought them in 
profile against the sky. Below Number Five there is but 
one track ; it plunges at once into a thick undergrowth of 
bushes, and after this we had no more desolate wastes of 
ashes, but a constant succession of trees and flowers, 
temples, and luxurious rest-houses, gay with the cotton 
flags presented to them by their patrons. The forest 
through which this path leads covers a steep ridge of 
lava ; the trees are mostly pine and other conifers, often 
very fine old specimens, and under them is a tangle of 
flowering shrubs and plants and of fallen timber. The 
people we met coming up seemed to appear suddenly 
under our feet out of the green gloom ; one party had 
always to draw aside while the other passed ; at times the 
path was a stairway of old roots, at others a ditch between 
high banks, and never wide enough for two to walk abreast. 
We heard a sound of singing below us, and stood on the 
bank while about twenty white-clad pilgrims filed by, men 
of all ages, each with a little bell tinkling at his waist ; 
the front ones chanted a short strain, which those at the 
back took up and answered, and their song was faintly 

141 



audible in the woods above us long after the last had dis- 
appeared up the winding path. The chant is called 
" Rokkon shojo " — the six senses purified — the six, accord- 
ing to the Buddhists, being eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, 
and heart, and it is only sung by the Fuji pilgrims. 

At Number Two station we made a long halt, emptied the 
ashes out of our boots, and washed our feet in the tubs of 
water which the little servants brought us. It was a very 
different kind of place from the rough shelter on the Gotem- 
ba side: the path came down a few steps as it emerged 
from the wood, passed under a torii by a small temple, and 
then spread out into quite a wide space in front of a long 
tea-house crowded with pilgrims. On the opposite side of 
this space were three or four platforms, spread with blank- 
ets and shaded with matting; these too were occupied by 
groups of guests, who smoked and drank tea as they rested, 
and below them the tops of the trees were cut away to give 
a space of open sky and a view of the distance. Hundreds 
of little flags were fluttering from long bamboo poles, and at 
the other end of this lively scene the path went down a few 
more steps, and became again a narrow track through the 
dense forest. The flowers all the way were abundant and 
beautiful, constantly varying as we descended from one zone 
to another ; at last the wood became thinner, and we could 
get glimpses of the distance, and of the grassy ridges on 
each side of us, tinged with pale mauve by masses of funkia 
in blossom ; and when we reached the temple and the large 
open square of the Uma-gaeshi we were at the end of the 
trees, and before us was a great slope of moorland leading 
down for miles and miles to the pine grove by Yoshida. 

There is but one break in the long walk through flowers 
and grass — a little tea-house called Naka-no-chaya, whose 
three pine-trees are distinguishable for a long distance across 
the moor. All round it there are monumental pillars covered 

142 



with inscriptions, which look like tombstones, but were 
really erected by pilgrims to commemorate the number of 
ascents which they have made. The variety of plants which 
grow and flourish on this slope of fine cinders is truly re- 
markable. The most abundant flower was a pale mauve 
scabious, which gave a prevailing tint to the whole moor- 
land, but the most conspicuous was a tall, slender day-lily 




THE RED-PINE GROVE AT YOSHIDA 



with a pale yellow flower, which shone like a star in the 
evening when the color had gone from all the others. A 
dark purple-blue campanula {Platycodon graiidiflorum) was 
also very eflective, and a bright crimson pink {Diaiithus 
superbus) with beautifully fringed petals. But it would be 
hopeless to try and enumerate them. I find in a sketch- 
book a list of fifty-seven which I noted on the way between 

145 



Naka-no-chaya and Yoshida. A little later in the year this 
mass of flowers and grass is mown down and carried to the 
villages at the foot of the mountain. 

The last part of our walk was through a grove of grand 
red pines, which seem to do better on this volcanic soil than 
anywhere else in Japan, and then across a few fields to the 
top of the long village street, where we at last found our tea- 
house and our baggage, and comfortable rooms, and settled 
down for a night of well-earned repose. 



FUJI FROM SUZUKAWA. 
• Oct. 3, 1892. 

Fuji is quite free from clouds this morning, and in the 
soft autumnal sunshine every detail is clearly visible as I 
sit with the shutters wide open and eat my breakfast. The 
foreground is a level plain of rice-fields, which stretches 
away for three or four miles to where the first gentle ascent 
is marked by a line of villages and trees, and in some 




FUJI OVER THE RICE-FIELDS OF SUZUKAWA 



places, where irrigation is possible, the terraced fields climb 
a little way up the mountain. Above them is a band of 
cultivated country, the general effect of it dark green, va- 
ried by stripes of paler green fields. At first the forms are 
sharply defined, but higher up the whole becomes a blue- 
green mass. Next above this is a band of moorland with 
no trees on it, lighter and warmer in color, the grasses and 
plants which cover it tinged with yellow or orange by the 
autumn. As the morning sun shines on it little blue shad- 
ows, in spots and waving lines, mark the undulations of its 
surface. This belt of moorland reaches to the height of 
about five thousand feet, and is very rich in flowers. Above 
it, again, is a great band of forest; the warm color of the de- 
ciduous trees at its lower edge gradually merges into the 
dark blue-green of the pines, which mount a long way up 
on the summits of the ridges that at this point seam the 
surface of the mountain. It is over this forest-land that 
the morning clouds generally begin to form. As I write, a 
little one, that looks like a puff of white steam, is beginning 
to float over the trees, and this will grow until in an hour's 
time the upper part of Fuji will be invisible. The well-de- 
fined gullies are a light orange-red tint, and the contrast be- 
tween them and the dark pines on the dividing ridges is 
the strongest opposition of color on Fuji, except that where 
the snow and the black lava meet at its summit. As the 
gullies ascend and the pines disappear the color again be- 
comes more uniform, dark gray with a tinge of Indian red, 
the red disappearing and the gray becoming a rich purple 
as it runs up in irregular points and lines among the lower 
snows. Only the very highest band is a solid white; on 
the left of the truncated top is Kenga-mine, the highest 
point of the crater's edge, and next it a flat line shows 
where the Murayama path enters; to the right of this a 
well-marked ridge of lava runs high up into the snow, and 

149 



can be traced down to the moorland, cutting off the Hoei- 
zan portion from the rest of the mountain. Beyond this 
ridge are two flatter curves — the summits of Jizotake and 
Kwannon-take — on the eastern side of the crater. The gen- 
eral outline of the mountain on the left is one simple curve, 
the almost level line where it begins to ascend from the Fuji- 
kawa River becoming steeper and steeper towards the top. 
The most distinct acceleration of grade is where the forests 
end and the ridges of lava begin. The outline on the right 
is broken just above the pine-clad ridges by the projection 
of Hoeizan, and again at the top of the moorland by an- 
other smaller hill — Tsurugi-zan ; and the effect on this side 
is not so much a curve as two inclined planes, the first from 
Kwannon-take to Hoeizan, the second from there to the 
moorland, after which it becomes an undulating line of 
mounds leading away to the Ashitaka range of older moun- 
tains. On this right side there is much less variety of color, 
a sharp ridge of warm orange lava makes a crest to Hoei- 
zan, but the great cup-like hollow behind it and the treeless 
slope below it are one uniform gray. Nearly two centuries 
have passed since the eruption which altered this outline of 
Fuji and destroyed the vegetation, and many more will have 
to elapse before the ashes are sufficiently disintegrated to 
entice back the trees and flowers. 




AUTUMN IN JAPAN 




THE AUTUMN LILY 



AUTUMN IN JAPAN 



W ROM the spring-time, when 
I reached Japan in the 
rain and began to grumble 
at the weather, and all 
through the damp and the 
downpour of the summer 
months, I had been consoled 
by the promises of my friends. 
They assured me that when 
the autumn came I should 
have week after week of glori- 
ous sunshine, a clear fresh air, 
and probably not a wet day be- 
tween Michaelmas and Christ- 
mas. Either the season was 
an exceptional one, or else this 
is a cherished myth; there cer- 
tainly were more fine days in 
October and November, but 
not a week passed without one 
or two days when work out-of- 
doors was impossible. They 
talked, too, of the glory of the 
maples, of hill-sides and rocky ravines clothed with scarlet 
and crimson, and their enthusiasm in this matter was am- 

153 




1^1 








FIELDS NEAR HAMAMATSU 



ply justified, but no one had told me of the beauty of the 
lilies of the field, which decorate so many of the banks 
between the rice patches with their tassels of glowing 
scarlet. I saw them first near Hamamatsu, a pleasant 
town on the Tokaido, which I reached on the i6th of 
September, after a little tour in the interior ; their brill- 
iant color at once attracted me, and I hastened to make 
drawings of them, for my passport had almost expired, and 
I feared that I might not find them elsewhere. There was 
no need to be in such a hurry, for they seem to grow abun- 
dantly wherever they get a chance. Hamamatsu was 
quite unlike any other Japanese town I had seen ; the 
houses had a projecting upper story and broad overhang- 
ing roofs, and the principal trade seemed to be in toys. 
There were shops full of drums and kites, and dolls with 
all their belongings, and the thousand and one things 
which the Japanese delight in giving to their beloved chil- 
dren. As I passed a little garden I saw what looked like 
a fearful atrocity — dozens of babies' heads, pale and gray 
as if in death, cut off at the neck and impaled on short 

154 



w 




stakes, stood about the ground ; but on coming nearer the 
mystery was explained : they were life-sized dolls' heads of 
papier-mache, put out to dry in the sun before receiving 
their final coat of paint. The neighboring villages were 
peculiar ; every cottage was protected from the winds by a 
high hedge of clipped yew, and the street seemed to pass 
between two green walls, over which the heavily thatched 
roofs just peeped. The openings gave a glimpse of court- 
yards and cottage fronts where women and men were hard 
at work, threshing their beans of many colors and spread- 
ing them on mats to dry, weaving blue cotton cloths, or 
winding off the skeins of shining yellow silk. The typhoon 
a fortnight earlier had strewn the Tokaido with pine-trees ; 
a passage wide enough for a jinrikisha to pass had been 
sawn through some of the great prostrate trunks, and oth- 
ers were still supported by their mangled limbs, so that we 
could squeeze under them. They sadly impeded the work 
of a company of white-clad engineers, who, with all the 
latest military contrivances, were laying a field - telegraph 
along the road. What a contrast were these sons of 
change to the fishermen returning from their morning's 
work with heavy loads of bonito, and to the peasants with 
their simple and primitive implements, all working and liv- 
ing as they have done for centuries past ! Politics and 
changes of government matter very little to them ; the rice 
crop and the take of fish are affairs of much more im- 
portance; they are the real life of a country, preserving its 
habits, costumes, and traditions, and staving off for a time 
the influences of railroads and steamships, which threaten 
to reduce man's condition throughout the world to one dull 
level of uniformity. 

Fortunately they form a solid majority in every land, a 
mass not easily moved, and even in progressive Japan it will 
be a long time before ill-cut trousers and steam-ploughs re- 

157 



place the kimono and the spade. The Tokaido Railway 
takes you in twelve hours from Hamamatsu to Kobe, and 
while waiting till a new passport came from Tokyo I had 
time to see a little more of the beautiful country around that 
hospitable port. The shores near Suma and Maiko, a little 
to the westward, are picturesque, and close by is the Strait 
of Akashi, through which a constant stream of traffic passes, 
ships of all kinds and sizes, from the little fishing-boats 
towed from the beach, to the big steamers from Europe and 
America. The island of Awaji lies across the entrance to 
the Inland Sea, leaving a narrow passage at each end ; but 
the tide rushes so violently through the Naruta Channel to 




THE ISLAND OF AWAJI, FROM MAIKO 



the south, between Awaji and Shikoku, that it is often un- 
navigable, and most of the shipping comes this way. There 
are the remains of a Daimio's castle at Akashi ; the main 
building is gone, and the plateau on which it stood is now 

158 



a garden with tea-booths, but the foundation walls, the cor- 
ner turrets, and the moat show what an important strong- 
hold it must have been ; and the view from it, down the 
Inland Sea to the west, over to the Shikoku Mountains on 
the south, and eastward to Osaka Bay and the hills of Ya- 
mato, is extensive and very fine in its outlines. At Maiko 







jffetA'D '"- 




ON THE SHORE NEAR MAIKO, THE STRAIT OF AKASHI TO THE RIGHT 



there is a grove of curiously blown and twisted pine-trees, 
with the quaint forms which are loved by all artists, es- 
pecially by the Japanese ; and near Suma, wherever the 
wiry grasses had got a foothold among the sand, the shore 
was gay with scarlet lilies. The botanic name of this 
flower, which is really more like an amaryllis than a lily, is 
Nerine japonica. Its Japanese name is not so easy to de- 
termine, for wherever I went it had a different one ; some of 
these, names are shiwata-bana, teku-sari, chiridji, and ushi- 
no-ninniku (cow-garlic), but I think the commonest is higam- 
bana (equinox flower), and the best, for its opening marks 
the change of the season, the beginning of the end. It is 

159 



probably because of this that, beautiful as it appears to 
European eyes, to the Japanese it is a flower of ill omen, 
associated in their minds with death and decay, and never 
used in art or in floral arrangements. The children, indeed, 
gather great armfuls of it ; but they never take it inside their 
homes; the great bunches they have collected are either 
scattered among the family tombstones or left to wither on 
the foot-paths. They seem to like picking it because its 
juicy stem snaps so easily, and often amuse themselves as 
they sit by the road-side by breaking the stalks half through, 
leaving them hanging in regular joints, much as our children 
make dandelion or daisy chains. Near a little graveyard set 
down among the rice-fields the flowers grew in great profu- 
sion, making a gorgeous splash of brilliant color as a fore- 
ground to the gray stones, the yellowing grain, and the pale 
blue distant hills. The rice was ripening fast, and fl.ocks of 




LILIES BY THE SHORE, SUMA 



rice-birds flew hurriedly across as they were chased from 
field to field by shouting boys. I wish I had made a sketch 
of a Japanese scarecrow ; there were plenty of them about, 
and I never saw one without laughing; they were lull ot 
quaint humor and invention, and the little birds seemed to 
enjoy them as much as I did. They recalled the remark of 
a stranger in a fly-haunted parlor in South Carolina, where a 
small clock-work windmill revolved in the centre of the table. 
I asked whether it drove the flies away, and the owner re- 






^ 



"-jf^sa^i 



^•k^-^*^'^^-'-i 




A GRAVEYARD AT SUMA 



plied, "At first it scared them some, but now they come in to 
ride round on it." The shore was always full of life and ac- 
tivity ; bronzed fishermen, naked except for a narrow white 
loin-cloth, were launching their boats or hauling them ashore, 
towing along the beach, pulling up nets, or chanting as the)^ 
rowed their heavy craft, standing up and pushing the long 
bent oars with a forward jerk, in the same way that a gon- 
dolier works. The smaller sailing-boats are all rigged with 

L l6l 




HILLS BEHIND KOBE 



the simple oblong sail which is so often shown in Japanese 
drawings, made of narrow strips of cotton cloth loosely laced 
together; the larger ones have a jib and a jig-sail as well. 

Futa-tabi, Maya-san, and the other hills which rise be- 
hind Kobe are as well worth seeing as the shore, full of 
picturesque walks ; the country at the back of them, com- 
monly called " Aden " by the foreign residents, on account 
of its barenness, is a curious waste of disintegrating granite, 
seamed and furrowed by the heavy rains, where only some 
scrubby bushes find a precarious foothold on the shifting 
soil. Coolies from the neighboring villages come and cut 
these for firewood, and carry the heavy fagots for miles to 
earn a few halfpence. In Arima, one of the hill villages, 
there are hot ferruginous springs where hundreds of people 
go to bathe ; but the arrangements are not so primitive 
as those I saw at Yumoto ; the baths and dressing-rooms 

162 



are private enough for the shy foreigner. There is so much 
iron in the water that you come out of it covered with a 
red deposit which takes some days of washing to remove. 
On this excursion, as my boots were in hospital, I tried 
Japanese foot-gear — thick cotton socks and straw sandals; 
they were very light and comfortable at first, but after a 
time I was conscious of every little pebble I trod on, and 
I got back to Kobe with a good deal of pain and many 
blisters. Foreigners who have often worn them get hard- 
ened between the toes, and many good walkers and moun- 
taineers use them habitually; heavy boots are an encum- 
brance when not on your feet, and though the straw sandals 
are quickly worn out, a few extra pairs are no serious addi- 
tion to your baggage. 

On the 6th of October I had finished my drawings 
among the pines and the sand hills, and a new passport 
had come, which gave me permission to wander for three 
months longer through the provinces near the Tokaido, so 
I bid farewell to my good friends and the comfortable 
club-house in Kobe, and Matsuba once more left his wife 
and family to follow my fortunes. 

Our destination was Maibara, a little town on Lake 




A BAMBOO YARD AT MAIBARA 
163 



Biwa, not many miles from Hikone. As I passed it by- 
rail I had noticed that the flooded fields on the margin of 
the lake were covered with a blue-flowered water-plant, a 
good foreground to the blue water and the distant moun- 
tains, and I hoped for blue skies to complete the picture, 
but they came only at rare intervals. On a piece of waste 




BLUE WATER- WE ED 



ground near my tea-house a travelling theatre had been 
erected, a structure of bamboo poles with mats hung over 
them, which was not calculated to keep an audience dry, 
and not once during my stay were the company able to 
give a performance. The manager occupied the room 
next mine ; he was an excellent performer on the samisen, 
and a pious man withal. Every morning from seven till 
half-past he said his prayers, repeating in a monotonous 
singsong voice a sentence which sounded to me like " Ya 
ya yura no," and tapping two blocks of wood together to 
keep time. He belonged to the Shingon sect of Buddhists. 

164 



The prayer formula of the Monto sect, one of the most 
popular and powerful, owning the great Hongwanji temples 
which are found in all large towns, is, "Namu Amida 
Butsu," while the followers of Nichiren, as they beat their 
drums, murmur constantly, " Namu myoho renge kyo." 

We soon became good friends, the manager and I, and 
he spent many hours in my room drinking tea, looking at 
my sketches, and in such conversation as my rudimentary 
knowledge of the language permitted, but unfortunately I 
never had an opportunity of seeing him act. When I left 
he presented me with a printed cotton towel in an orna- 
mental wrapper, and I gave him a penny black-lead pencil, 
and we parted with mutual expressions of esteem. I had 
other visitors too : the station-master and the chief of 
police wanted to see my pictures, and Takaki, O Shige 
San, and little Kazu, with the brown velvet eyes, came 
over from Hikone to call on me, and arranged to meet me 
at the Nagahama matsuri. This annual festival takes place 
in the middle of October, and seems to be a gathering- 
ground for all the country-side. In many respects it was 
very like a country fair in England, but the main event on 
all the three days is the perambulation of large triumphal 
cars, called yama, on which companies of children give 
dramatic performances. I was fortunate in having a brill- 
iantly fine day, and as I bowled along the five miles of 
level road from Maibara in a kuruma with two good run- 
ners, I passed troops of people in holiday attire, old peas- 
ants, gayly dressed young girls, and wandering friars with 
huge bamboo hats that looked like bushel baskets. The 
town was gayly decorated with flags and with lanterns 
bearing the device of the city, and crowds were pouring 
into it by road and rail and boat ; for Nagahama is a busy 
port at the northern end of Lake Biwa, and a regular ser- 
vice of steamers runs between there and Otsu, at the south- 



ern end. This mixture of things ancient and modern in 
Japan always seems amusing, especially when, as in Naga- 
hama, there is not much of the modern. The row-boats 
which came in with their loads of passengers were of un- 
varnished wood, decorated with black patterns on the 
bows, and, except the police and the railway officials, I saw 
very few men in European dress ; there certainly were no 
women in anything but their own becoming costume, and I 
was the only foreigner in the town. My landlord had been 
thoughtful enough to engage a place for me in a tea-house 
opposite which the yama stopped and gave a performance : 
all the partitions had been removed, and the floor, divided 
into squares by low movable railings, was covered with 
family parties who had brought their own cushions and 
provisions. 

My heart was filled with covetousness as I saw the fine 
old lacquer bento boxes which they produced after care- 




LAUNCHING A BOAT 



fully removing many silk wrappings. There are twelve 
yama in the town, each owned by a different guild or soci- 
ety, the members of which teach the children their parts, 
provide dresses for their play, and accompany the yama 
on the festival days. The cars are huge things, taller than 
most of the Japanese houses, and quite fill up the nar- 

i68 



row streets ; they are built on solid wooden wheels, and 
are dragged about by strings of coolies, the young men of 
the guild dancing and shouting in front of them, waving 
fans by day and lanterns after dark to direct the coolies' 
movements, while the older members follow in white-cur- 
tained carts. The wood-work around the stage is lacquered, 
gold and black and red, with elaborate brass ornaments, 
and the pagoda -like roof which covers it is of burnished 
gold, surmounted with a dragon or phoenix or other myth- 
ical animal. The part behind the stage is enclosed with 
hangings, Chinese embroideries, Persian rugs, or silk bro- 
cades, and two of them had fine pieces of Flemish tapestry, 
which must have come over with the Dutch centuries ago; 
the buxom ladies and knights in armor looked odd, and yet 
pleasantly familiar, and my heart went out to the expatriated 
strangers, so lonely amid that Eastern crowd. In front of 
each stage hung a bunch of " gohei," the twisted strips of 
white paper which are the universal emblem of the Shinto 
religion, the only simple things among the masses of gor- 
geous color, and they seemed to give the key-note to the 
whole ; for Shinto is, above everything else, an ancestor- 
worship, a religious respect for the country and for the 
men whose heroic deeds still inspire its people, and the 
short dramas which the children acted were all founded on 
old stories — how Yoritomo's son sacrificed his life to save 
the young Mikado, and other well-known motives from 
Japanese history. The boys were admirably trained and 
beautifully dressed ; they rolled their eyes and grimaced in 
exactly the same way as their elders of the profession, and 
the crowd vigorously applauded their facial contortions. 
In one company there was a little mite of two years old ; 
he had not to speak at all, only to cry out once or twice, 
but he knew his part as well as the rest, and always looked 
up at his boy father at the right moment. During the af- 

171 



ternoon I walked round the town, first to the Buddhist 
temple, the great hall of which was crowded with people 
sleeping, eating, and praying, and then up the long avenue 
leading to the Shinto temple of Hachiman. It was lined 
with stalls and booths for refreshments of all kinds, with 
conjurers, purse -trick men, lucky wheels, quack-medicine 
venders, and so on, and near the big granite torii and lan- 
terns were the market-gardeners with dwarf pines, oranges 
laden with fruit, camellias, and other trees. One had noth- 
ing but orchid-plants, none of them, unfortunately, in flower. 
I joined a large circle of spectators who were watching a 
scriever, which is, I believe, the professional name for the 
artists who draw on the flag-stones ; this one had no pave- 
ment, so he prepared an even ground by sprinkling some 
light gray sand over the dusty road ; his colors were bags 
of black, white, red, and blue sand ; from one of these he 
took a handful, and drew his design by letting the pow- 
der run from his closed fist in a line which varied in thick- 
ness as he tightened or loosened his grasp. He wrote or 
drew in this way with wonderful rapidity as he squatted on 
the ground, and he talked all the time, obliterating each 
drawing as soon as he had finished it. I watched him draw 
a figure of a girl, and he began by putting down the spots 
of the pattern on her kimono with blue, then added the 
shadow lines of the dress, relieved it here and there with 
white, sketched the face and hands in red, and finally added 
a bold outline in black, which completed the picture, thus 
working in that reverse way to our natural instincts which 
you so often notice in this land of Topsy-turvydom. 

As evening approached, all the yama began to collect 
in the square in front of another Shinto temple, where the 
great Hachiman car with colossal swords, and the Mikoshi, 
a shrine carried about on men's shoulders, were already 
placed. In the river on one side of this square many 

172 



boats were moored, spread with rush mats and with the 
red blankets which have become so common in Japan, 
and in them people were picknicking; over the bridge 
which crossed it the unwieldy structures were dragged 
from the town by shouting crowds ; each in turn gave a 
final performance in front of the temple, and was then 
drawn aside to make room for the next. This began at 
half-past five, and it was eleven o'clock before the last of 




ONE OF THE "YAMA" AT THE NAGAHAMA MATSURI 
From a printed programme sold on the street 



them had been ranged with the others to the right of the 
temple steps. As night came on they were covered with 
big lanterns, the stages were lighted by lamps in glass 
shades, and attendants with candles on long sticks illumi- 
nated the face of each little actor while he was speaking. 
When the six gorgeous yama with their attendants and 
gayly dressed performers were all drawn up in line against 

173 



1/ \ 








^^'^ 



SOME HATS AT THE NAGAHAMA MATSURI 



a background of solemn cryptomerias, with an excited 
crowd dancing and waving lanterns in front of them, the 
spectacle was more beautiful than any words of mine can 
suggest. In spite of the excitement, I saw only one quarrel ; 
a young man, in order to get nearer to the stage, had pushed 
past a big coolie, who had evidently taken as much sake 
as he could carry, and for a few seconds I thought there 
would be a fight ; but a bystander pointed out to the 
indignant man that the youth had to get nearer because 
he was short-sighted and wore spectacles, and peace was at 
once restored. On the way back to our tea-house, where 
my friends from Tennenji had dined with me, we passed a 
street full of stalls, with pipes and pouches, cheap jewelry, 
hair-pins and combs, and many other knick-knacks suit- 
able for presents. I wanted a few of them, and found that 

Shige San was a talented shopper ; she had her limit, ten 
sen, and usually succeeded in getting the article for that 
sum, whatever the original price might have been. As 

1 wandered round early the next morning I found that the 
yama had already been moved to their stations in various 

174 




THE TEMPLE GARDEN, SEIGWANJI 



streets, and were being cleaned up in preparation for the 
day's performances. The town is studded with tall fire- 
proof go-downs, in which the precious vehicles are safely- 
stored during the rest of the year. 

Near Maibara there were large orchards of persimmons 
with brilliant-colored fruit, which, as Andrew Marvel says 
of the oranges, "hang like gold lamps in a green night." 
They were particularly beautiful in the well-designed garden 
of Seigwanji, where I made some sketches. It is a fine 
example of a temple garden, and some massive evergreen 
oaks form an impressive background to the gray stones, 
the carefully trained pines, and the trimly clipped shrubs; 
but except for the persimmons, a few reddening maple 
leaves, some late blooms of platycodon, and the scarlet 
berries of a little ardisia, it was 
all green and gray. 

In the cottage gardens near 
Suzukawa, a little station on the 
Tokaido to the south of Fuji 
where I made a short halt late 
in October, I began to see some 
chrysanthemum flowers ; they 
were not particularly fine or ef- 
fective, but I found plenty to 
paint there, and wished very 
much that the days and my re- 
maining weeks in Japan were 
not getting so short. The vil- 
lage lies behind a range of sand 
dunes, which are overgrown with 
ancient pines, and beyond them 
is the shore of Suruga Bay, a 
grand expanse of gray volcanic 
sand, called by the Japanese 




INIATURE PAGODA IN THE TEMPLE 
GARDEN, SEIGWANJI 



Tago-no-ura, where fishermen are always hauling at nets in 
lines of naked brown figures against the blue sea, or wan- 
dering back in groups across the sands in long dark-blue 
coats, with pale- blue and white handkerchiefs tied over 
their heads, carrying their nets and parcels of fish wrapped 
in straw. At my tea-house, the Koshuya, I reaped the re- 
sult of their labors, and got excellent dinners of red or gray 
tai, lobsters, and huge prawns, cooked by a man who was 
a real artist and took a pride in his profession. 

The first really fine chrysanthemums I saw were in Yo- 
kohama, when I got back there early in November ; I was 
disappointed to find that they were in temporary sheds put 
up to protect them from rain and sun, and not in masses 
out-of-doors, as I expected to see them ; but they were ex- 
cellently grown, and in the softened light of the oil-paper 
shades their colors showed to great advantage. The plants 
are treated much as they are with us, raised in pots from 
cuttings taken in the spring, and encouraged with plenty of 
manure until the buds are formed; before flowering they 
are removed from their pots and planted out in bold groups 
of color in the beds which have been prepared for them. 
Some plants are reduced to a single stem, on which only 
one enormous blossom is allowed to develop; these are 
generally arranged in a line, with each flower stiffly tied to 
a horizontal bamboo support, and the effect is very sad ; 
but the excellence of the gardeners is best shown in 
growing large bushes, which have been known to carry as 
many as four hundred flowers of medium size, all in perfect 
condition, on the same day. An English gardener who had 
visited every show within reach of Tokyo, including the 
Emperor's celebrated collection in the palace grounds, told 
me that he had seen no individual blossoms equal to the 
best dozen or so at a first-rate London exhibition, but that 
these great plants with their hundreds of flowers were tri- 

178 



umphs of horticulture. The most curious examples of 
chrysanthemum-growing were to be seen in the Dangozaka 
quarter of Tokyo. The long hilly street is bordered on 
each side with gardens enclosed with high bamboo fences, 
and in every one, by paying three rin, you could see groups 
of life-size figures mainly covered with chrysanthemum 
leaves and flowers. They represented scenes from history, 
the drama, or Buddhist mythology, and were constructed 
with frame-works of bamboo, inside which the flower-pots 
were concealed, the shoots being brought through the open- 
ings and trained over the outer surface. The heads and 
hands were made of painted wood, and swords and other 
accessories were added to make them more life-like; the 
draperies of living leaves and flowers were skilfully ar- 
ranged in large folds, and, as in most of the popular shows, 
they depicted the costumes of Daimio and Samurai of the 
past. At each entrance I was given a sort of play-bill, a 
roughly printed broad-sheet with a wood-cut and a descrip- 
tion of the different groups, serving as an advertisement of 
the gardener's establishment. One of the finest places for 
autumn colors is the large garden behind the arsenal in the 
Koishikawa quarter, laid out by a former Prince of Mito as 
a quiet retreat for his old age. It covers several acres, and 
is certainly very beautiful, with its lakes and islands, solemn 
groves and shrines ; but it is silent and deserted ; the peo- 
ple are only admitted by a special permission ; and I liked 
better the maples which line the banks of the Taki-no-gawa 
near Oji, where crowds were quietly enjoying themselves, 
sipping tea and sake as they sat in front of the tea-houses 
and gazed down on the trees, or strolling along in pictu- 
resque groups under the crimson canopy of foliage. The 
little river glides along with barely a ripple, and it reflected 
all the glory of the leaves which stretched over it in sprays 
of scarlet and gold, reminding me of a Japanese poem, " I 

i8i 



wish to cross the river, but fear to cut the brocade on its 
surface." Another poem, dating from the time when it was 
customary to present silk or cloth to the Shinto gods in- 
stead of the " gohei," which now serve as a symbol, shows 
the national admiration of the autumn leaves : " This time 
I bring no offering ; the gods can take the damask of the 
maple-trees on Tamukeyama." 

There are many other trees in the rich flora of Japan 
which are as gay as the maples, though no others which 
show as great a variety of color ; the dark leaves of the 
tulip -tree turn to a rich cadmium yellow, and the icho 
(Salisburia) is covered with pale gold, while many of the 
shrubs, grasses, and herbaceous plants with bright and 
varied tints help to relieve the solemn everlasting green of 
the pines and cryptomerias which clothe the eternal hills. 

And so in a blaze of glory the Japanese year ends ; but 
long before these last leaves have fallen the camellias are 
once more in flower, and continue until the plum blossom 
comes in February, a connecting link in the chain of beauty 
and flowers which encircles this happy land. One of my 
last days in Tokyo was spent in showing my drawings to 
the students of the Uyeno School of Art, where Professor 
Okakura, the president, who combines with a good knowl- 
edge of Western art a great reverence for that of his own 
country, is attempting with no small success to keep up the 
artistic tradition, and to revive those artistic industries 
which were faUing into decay. He had invited artists of 
other schools, some of whom had studied in Paris and 
Rome, but I was most interested in the remarks and ques- 
tions of the purely Japanese students, and in their eager- 
ness to discover any motive, besides the reproduction of 
nature, in work so different from their own. 

At the Asakusa matsuri they were already selling em- 
blems suited for the new year — the rice -rake to scrape 

182 



together dollars; the rice-bag, daikon, and red tai, sugges- 
tive of good fare ; and the target with an arrow in the 
bull's-eye, meaning, " May you hit the mark !" arranged 
round a mask of the goddess of fortune ; and with a stock 
of these to bring me good-luck, I sailed away on the loth 
of December across the dreary and flowerless Pacific. 





LYCHNIS GRANDIFLORA, MISAKA-TOGE 



SOME WANDERINGS IN JAPAN 




TRICYRTIS HIKTA, ATAMI 



SOME WANDERINGS IN JAPAN 



(s^ 



L 



\/ 



^f^(\l/jl 




"^HE lakes which 
He to the north 
of Fuji are not much 
visited by foreigners; 
they are rather diffi- 
cult of access, and the 
accommodation in the 
tea-houses in that dis- 
trict is not luxurious ; 
but for those who can 
walk well, and put up 
with ordinary Japanese 
food and lodging, the 
scenery will atone for 
everything. The old 
hills on the north once 
looked over a great 
sloping plain to the shore of Suruga Bay, but the upstart 
Fuji arose and blocked their view to the south ; streams 
of lava poured from it, and rolled down till they were 
stopped by these buttresses of ancient rock, damming 
the rivers, and so forming this chain of lakes at their 
base. Where the lava has been covered with fine ashes, 
vegetation soon begins to conceal the work of destruc- 
tion, but the larger flows resist all attempts at cultiva- 

189 




tion ; they still stand in wide ridges above the rest of the 
country, gray lichens cover them, and dwarfed trees find a 
foothold in the crevices between their blocks. The wind- 
ing tracks which lead across them are bad enough, for every 
little hump in the path is not a pebble which rolls aside as 
your foot touches it, but is a knob of solid rock, and it is 
your toe that has to give way; the untrodden part of the 
scrubby forest would stop any animal but an active monkey. 
We traversed one of the widest flows, called Aoki-ga-hara 
(green-tree moor), from the number of evergreens which 
grow over it, on the way between Shoji, the smallest, and 
Motosu, the largest of the lakes, walking for hours in single 
file along a narrow trail with hardly an opening anywhere 
in the dense foliage ; it was late in the evening, and the 
imprecations in Japanese and English ought to have thrown 
a lurid light on that dusky path. The dividing-line be- 
tween the lava and the older rock is as clearly visible now 
as it was on that day when the molten torrent was arrested 
in its course and piled itself in a solid wave against the im- 
movable hills. Some subterranean settling must still be 
going on, for a few years ago the lakes began to rise, and 
they have remained at the higher level, so that as we rowed 
along the shore we could see below us the roofs of cottages 
and the fences of rice-fields, and forests of dead pines rose 
gaunt and bare out of the water. Of all the places I saw in 
Japan, Motosu seemed the most remote ; the rise of the 
lake must have ruined many of the inhabitants, and a settled 
gloom seemed to hang over the few charcoal-burners, wood- 
cutters, and fishermen who remain. We found rooms in an 
old tea-house, where fine wood-work, now blackened and 
decayed, showed signs of a former prosperity which will 
hardly revive unless prices rise, for when we left the next 
morning the landlord sadly presented us with a bill for nine- 
teen sen (about sixpence), which for two foreigners and two 

190 



servants came to a very modest sum per head. We "crossed 
the lake by boat, and were landed at the foot of a trackless 
hill-side, overgrown with tall grasses and wild flowers, through 
which it was difficult to walk, but our local guides soon 
found a path which led us in the direction of the Fujikawa. 
Here we were off the volcanic soil, the beeches and other 
trees were magnificent, and in one wood we walked between 
banks of maidenhair fern [Adiantum pedatiim) growing five 
or six feet high. How well I remember that day of glorious 
sunshine, the view back over the lake with Fuji towering 






TAGO-NO-URA 



behind it, the mountain road through forests with new trees 
and plants at every turn, the gaudy butterflies, the long zig- 
zag descent by the pine-clad spur which brought us to the 
Suzukawa Valley, and the gorgeous sunset as we whirled 
down the rapids to Shimoyama. There are five lakes in the 
chain, Motosu, Shoji, Nemba, Kawaguchi, and Yamanaka, 
and they descend in level from Motosu on the west to 
Yamanaka on the east. Nemba lies in a hollow of wood- 
ed hills, with a couple of partially drowned villages on its 

191 



shore, in which the cottage roofs are strangely constructed, 
and the people wear long knickerbockers of blue striped 
cotton. Kawaguchi is the most beautiful of them all ; its 
waters have only risen a foot or two, so that no damage 
has been done except the submersion of a few fields, and 
Funatsu and Kodachi, with picturesque old temples and 
cottages shaded with gourds, like Jonah's, are thriving 
towns compared with the other lake-side hamlets. 

I was staying at Yoshida, within easy walking distance 
of Funatsu, in the early part of September, when all the 
countryside was keeping the Bon festival in memory of the 
dead — a sort of Japanese All-Souls day which lasts for a 
week. Fires were lighted at night on all the hill-sides ; the 
path leading up to every little temple could be traced by a 
line of blazing spots, and the great lonely slope of Fuji was 
dotted with them here and there, marking the positions of 
the rest-houses and the few scattered huts of grass-cutters 
and charcoal-burners. I have seen the same thing in 
Switzerland, near Martigny, where on the eve of St. John's 







^, -^T^^ 



COTTAGES AT NEMBA 



day every cattle-tender far up the mountains greeted his 
distant neighbors with a bonfire. This part of the cere- 
mony is called, in Japanese, hi-matsiiri (fire festival). Oth- 
er observances are placing offerings of food before the 
family graves, which in Yoshida were generally at the end 
of the back garden, and erecting a little altar in the house, 
on which dishes of rice, fruit, and sweetmeats are laid, and 
before which prayers are said. 

We had a typhoon on the 4th of September, with such 
torrents of rain and gusts of wind that the houses had to 
be enclosed with their wooden shutters, and there was 
nothing to be done but lie on the floor in the darkness 
and listen to the turmoil of the elements outside. Sud- 
denly, above all the other noises, I heard a monotonous 
chant, and, opening a crack in my shutters, I saw a proces- 
sion of men, dressed only in "kasa" and straw rain-coats 
passing down the village street. Some of them carried big 
drums slung to poles, on which the others banged, while 
all of them groaned in unison a sentence which I could 
not catch. It was a long time before I could induce 
Matsuba to tell me what it all meant ; but at last he con- 
fessed that it was done to drive away the storm-demon ; he 
was evidently ashamed of this method of praying for fair 
weather, and explained that it was only in these out-of-the- 
way places his countrymen were so superstitious. Any- 
how, it was efficacious, for the typhoon blew itself out dur- 
ing the night. There was more or less rain for some days 
after, but we had nothing again like that day's downpour, 
and I started in more promising weather for a walk over 
the hills to Kofu. From Funatsu I crossed a corner of 
Kawaguchi, and took a steep mountain road on the other 
side; some kind of matsuri was going on there too, and 
the lake was dotted with boatfuls of people beating drums 
and singing. The road we took is said in the guide-books 

193 



to be practicable for jinrikishas, but the typhoon had com- 
pleted the work of destruction which the heavy rains in 
July had begun, and there were very few yards of it left 
over which a wheeled vehicle could travel. On the other 
side of the pass, Misaka-toge, where I stayed to lunch and 
admire the view of Fuji, and to collect seeds of a grand red 
lychnis which grew there abundantly, we went through a 
village, Nakagawa, that had been almost destroyed by a 
torrent. The street and the gardens were filled with 
bowlders and gravel and fallen tree trunks, and the roofs 
only were visible above the mass of wreckage. The well- 
fitted timbers of a Japanese roof, especially when there is 
a heavy thatch over them, make it the least destructible 
part of the house ; the lower part may collapse in a ty- 
phoon or earthquake, but the roof settles down over the 
ruins practically uninjured. I saw one near the Tokaido 
which had been taken off bodily by the wind and deposited 
in a field the other side of the road without losing its shape. 
I looked for the river which had done all this damage to 
Nakagawa, and found only a little, innocent, prattling brook 
about a yard wide. 

Kofa is a busy place in the centre of a large silk-growing 
district All the hill-sides around are covered with scrubby- 
looking mulberry bushes, and in the villages almost every 
cottage had its pile of golden cocoons, which the women 
were winding off into skeins as they sat and chattered by 
their doorways. As you pass Japanese houses in fine 
weather you see almost everything that is going on inside ; 
they are set down close to the road, and the sliding-screens 
allow you to look right through to the garden at the back. 
When it is cold or wet all the wooden shutters are closed, 
and they have then a very sad and deserted appearance. I 
went to a very good theatre in Kofu, and afterwards to what 
might be called a wax-work show, but that the figures were 

194 



made of carved and painted wood, where the incidents of 
the murder of li-Kamonno-Kami were represented with a 
startling fidelity to nature. He was assassinated one win- 
ter's night in the streets of Tokyo by the retainers of a rival 
Daimio, and the snowy ground showed to advantage al.l the 
details of disembowelled bodies and mangled limbs. The 
last two figures were mechanical. A retainer kneeling in 
front of the Daimio slowly opened a bloody handkerchief 
and showed him the head of his enemy, whereupon the 
Daimio's eyebrows went up and the corners of his mouth 
went down, giving him a most comical expression of horror. 
The roads are wider here than in most parts of Japan, 
and there are comparatively few jinrikishas. Most of the 
travelling is done in basha, small wagonettes with no 
springs, which jolt the very life out of you. I engaged one 
to take me on to Lake Suwa, on the Nakasendo road, a 
journey of forty miles, and arrived there feeling like an 
aching jelly. After travelling a few miles from Kofu we 
came to a river where the bridge had been washed away. 
I and my baggage were ferried over, and the driver at- 
tempted to ford it, but the water was too deep for him, and 
I was left stranded with my impedimenta on a wide waste 
of pebbles. Fortunately the man with whom I had made 
my bargain had foreseen this possibility, and when I could 
get some coolies to help me with my baggage across half a 
mile of stones and bowlders, I found another basha wait- 
ing for me. All the first part of the journey was a long 
ascent through wooded, hilly country, with road- side vil- 
lages at short intervals. In one of them, Tsutaki, where 
we stopped to change horses, a school treat was going on. 
The place was gayly decorated with lanterns and arches of 
leaves and paper flowers, and in the temple court-yard the 
children had made realistic figures, among them a life-sized 
tiger, ingeniously constructed with straws of different col- 

197 



ors. The low wooden cottages, with broad eaves and 
stones piled on the top, looked very like Swiss chalets, ex- 
cept that they all had green roof crests, sometimes of iris, 
but more often of a bunchy kind of lycopodium which the 
natives called yuwashiba. Almost every one had a screen 
of bamboo on the south side, with gourds of different kinds 
growing up it and tumbling over the roof and the out-build- 
ings. At last, with long spells of walking, very welcome as 
a rest from the weary jolting, we reached the tea-house at 
the top of the pass, and then rattled down a somewhat bet- 
ter road for about twelve miles, emerging at dusk into the 
broad mountain-guarded valley in which Suwa lies. The 
flat lands near the lake are intersected by little streams 
and canals, along which the peasants go to their work in 
long, narrow punts, very like those which are used for the 
same purpose in Picardy — another instance of the way in 
which similar conditions in widely distant countries lead to 
similer habits and inventions. 

I stayed at Kami-no-suwa in a delightful tea-house, with 
clean polished wood-work, and quilts covered with a soft 
thin silk called kaiki, very pleasant and cooling to a mos- 
quito-tortured skin. Cleanliness is the great luxury of the 
Japanese ; their foot-gear is always removed before enter- 
ing the house, so that the mats may not be soiled ; the 
wood-work is never painted, stained, or varnished, but left 
with a well-planed surface, which shows its natural color ; 
the ceilings are thin planks, slightly overlapping each other, 
the grain of each being carefully selected to combine with 
the lines in those next it ; there are no hangings or fixed 
pieces of furniture to collect the dust, and no carpets to 
be taken up and shaken, so that spring cleaning, that terror 
of the Western house-keeper, is unnecessary; the whole 
room can be swept out every morning, the walls and ceil- 
ing rubbed with a duster, and there it is, all as neat as a 




TOURISTS AT A WATERFALL 



_.'^ -w/ 



A 




NIEGAWA, ON THE NAKASENDO 



new pin. At Shimo - no - suwa, about three miles on, the 
Koshu-kaido, along which I had been travelling from Kofu, 
joins the Nakasendo, the central mountain road, one of the 
main routes between Kyoto and Tokyo. A new road has 
been made most of the way, admirably engineered, with 
gentle gradients, but so badly executed that it had already 
fallen to pieces in some places, and it was covered with 
loose road-metal which made jinrikisha travelling very la- 
borious. My men usually preferred the old steep road, 
which cuts off corners, and is solid though very rough, and 
after a couple of days I sent back all the jinrikishas except 
the one which carried my baggage, finding my own legs the 
best means of conveyance. From the Shiojiri Pass I looked 
back over Suwa, saw Fuji through the blue haze of a lovely 
autumn morning, a long way off, but still towering above all 
the other hills, and then dropped down into a new set of 
mountains, rivers, and valleys. The scenery of the Naka- 



sendo gets more and more picturesque, until it reaches a 
climax in the valley of the Kisogawa, on which I first looked 
from the summit of the Torii Pass, four thousand and odd 
feet above the sea. Each village on the road had its own 
peculiarities of costume, architecture, and manufacture — 
cheap lacquer- ware, combs, pickles, and so on, and of all 
these Matsuba bought a stock, for it is the habit of every 
Japanese on his travels to take back with him "meibutsu," 
the characteristic productions of the places he has visited, 
as presents for those he has left at home. 

There are many celebrated mountains in this district, 
each wdth its own special god and shrines, and I con- 
stantly met bands of pilgrims dressed in white, with long 
staves and big hats, or saw boat-loads of them going down 




-.^>-^^^^L 



ifflj; 



A LITTLE SHINTO SHRINE, NEAR THE NAKASENDO 



the Kisogawa in the few places where it is navigable. 
After some days of glorious weather, with a sun which 
turned the wings of the myriad dragon-flies hovering over 
the rivers to spots of light, and made all clothing seem 
superfluous, I was suddenly arrested by a violent storm at 
a little village called Suwara. A number of pilgrims had 
been driven to shelter in the same tea - house ; they spent 
the day in chanting prayers, ringing a little bell, and tap- 
ping blocks of wood together to mark the time ; and they 
began it again at three o'clock the next morning, before 
starting on their trudge. The motive of these pilgrimages 
is not in the least penitential. Certain hardships have to 
be endured by every traveller in mountain regions, but the 
Japanese are good walkers and accustomed to simple liv- 
ing, and in their composition they have a large stock of in- 
telligent curiosity which makes them enjoy all that is new 
and beautiful in the country through which they pass. 
The history and literature of their fatherland form a large 
part of their education, and almost every remarkable spot 
has some legendary or poetical association apart from its 
natural beauty; their religion teaches them, too, that not 
only temples and shrines are sacred, but that every poetic 
thought or heroic deed, every grand tree or rock or lovely 
landscape, has in it something of the divine. 

On the banks of the Kisogawa, not far from Suwara, 
there is a large flat rock, which is called Nezame-no-toko, 
the Bed of Awakening, for here Urashima the fisher-boy, 
a sort of Japanese Rip Van Winkle, is supposed by some 
to have returned to real life after his long trance. The 
usual version of the story is this : Urashima lived with 
his parents at Yura, by the sea of Japan, helping them in 
their fishing ; but one day his boat did not return, and 
he was given up for dead. He had met the Sea-god's 
daughter, who had taken him away to live with her and 

205 



love her in an evergreen land. What seemed to him like 
a few weeks passed by in happiness, but at last he said, 
" My parents will be sorrowing for me ; I must go back 
and comfort them," and he prevailed on his princess to 
spare him for a while. She gave him a casket, saying that 
as long as he kept it closed she would always be with 
him, but if he opened it, she and the evergreen land would 
be lost to him forever. He had really been away for cen- 
turies, his home had disappeared, and everything in Yura 
was changed. In despair he opened the forbidden box, a 
faint blue mist floated out from it across the sea, he turned 
from a handsome youth to an old decrepit man, and in a 
few minutes lay dead upon the shore, for in that box his 
princess had enclosed all the hours of their happy life. 

No portion of the Nakasendo is finer than that near 
Midono ; the valley narrows and the road in many places 
overhangs the rushing Kisogawa, the vegetation is luxu- 
riant, walnuts, oaks, chestnuts, and maples shade the road, 
and great groves of bamboo wave their plumes in every 
little breeze which comes down from the mountains through 
the ravines in which they grow. By the river-side I noticed 
many fine-leaved plants ; some old garden friends, and 
others new to me ; yellow wagtails fluttered jauntily from 
rock to rock, and lines of swallows on the telegraph wires 
showed that autumn was at hand. 

I turned off from the Nakasendo at Hashiba, where it 
begins to ascend the Magome Pass, and took a little cross- 
country track, turning eastward again up the valley of the 
Hirosegawa, which, after two days' walking, brought me to 
lida and the banks of the Tenryugawa. This road was 
not mentioned in my guide-book, but Nakajima Sanju, the 
jinrikisha man who had accompanied me all the way from 
Kami-no-suwa, maintained that it was practicable, and that 
he could take my baggage through in his kuruma. He did 

206 







■^T^.^M^' 



JLW- 




THE FEKKY AT TOKIMATA 



it, too, but I occasionally had to hire two extra men to help 
him, and in some places they and Matsuba had to carry 
kuruma, baggage and all. There was one long climb 
through a dense wood which particularly impressed me ; I 
walked so far ahead of them that I could only just hear 
the continual cry, " Yo-sha ! Yo-sha !" with which the 
men encouraged each other ; the masses of foliage above 
me, the shrubs and ferns below them, enclosed me in a 
green maze ; from under the arched roots of a colossal 
cryptomeria a clear little spring gushed out; occasionally a 
raucous-voiced jay flew across the path, or I had to stop 
and examine the huge toads, seven or eight inches long 
and almost as broad, that sprawled about on the road-side. 
When my men overtook me at a tea-house some miles far- 
ther on, one of them was carrying a brace of these toads 
skinned. They looked as big as the " poulet " of a cheap 
restaurant, and he told me that they were very good for 
weakly children. 

At Tokimata I engaged a boat with five men to take me 
down the rapids as far as the Tokaido ; the river was run- 
ning high, and they would not do it for less than twenty- 
four yen — a good price for a journey of only ten or twelve 
hours ; but when you remember that it takes them ten 
days or a fortnight to haul the boat back, it does not seem 
o 209 



excessive. Don Pedro's remark, " What need the bridge 
much wider than the flood ?" does not apply to most of the 
Japanese rivers ; usually they are just a trickle of water 
among a wide bed of pebbles, which is filled after heavy 
rains with a raging torrent, but Lake Suwa serves as a 
reservoir for the Tenryugawa, and it always has enough 
water to be navigable. The boats used on it are about 
thirty feet long, flat-bottomed and flat sided, with a square 
stern and a high, pointed bow ; they are very loosely built 
and flexible, and the bottom boards are so thin that they 
wabble like a sheet of paper when passing over rough 
water or shallows. A heavy foot would break through 
them, and it is necessary to tread only on the bamboos 
which are laid lengthwise, resting on the cross-ribs. 




ON THE TENRYUGAWA 



My baggage was piled in the middle of the boat, and a 
seat arranged on it for Matsuba and myself ; one man took 
the long stern oar while the other four worked in the bows, 
and within a few minutes of the start we were plunging 
down between high cliffs, charging at rocks which we only 
avoided by a few inches, swirling round in eddies at the 
foot of one rapid while the men got breath for the next, 
and until we stopped for our mid-day meal at the little vil- 



lage of Nakabe there was no time to sketch, or think, or do 
anything but enjoy the wild, exciting race. The river twists, 
between high mountains, down a gorge with such sharp 
curves that it is often impossible to see any exit, and our 
boat would rush down, heading straight for a cliff against 
which the water dashed furiously; while one man in the 
bows whacked the side with his paddle for luck, and then 
stood ready with a pole, the other three pulled like mad, 
and just when I thought '' we must come to grief this time," 
she would suddenly turn and swish round the corner into 
smoother water. The rapids continued to be amusing, 
though the fun was not quite so fast and furious, all the way 
to Kajima, where the mountains end and a broad plain be- 
gins ; below here the river still ran swiftly, but smoothly, 
divided into several channels by long gravel banks, on which 
gray willows and bamboos grew, and snipe and herons con- 
gregated. We met strings of boats being laboriously towed 
along: the wind generally blows up stream, and they are 




ON THE TENRYUGAWA, NEAR KAJIMA 



able on these lower reaches to help themselves by hoisting a 
sail, but I shall never understand how they get their boats 
back through those upper rapids. It was getting dark when 
we passed through the ruins of the old Tokaido bridge, but 
in the dusk I could distinguish a row of familiar Noah's-ark- 
like forms; they were current -mills moored in the river; 
and then I knew what my day had lacked — the companion- 
ship of the man with whom I had passed so many hundreds 
of them on the Danube. There was nothing on the Danube 
quite so sporting as these rapids, but I think it would be 
possible to get through them in a decked canoe, such as 
those we used on that river. The pace is tremendous ; we 
did the ninety miles from Tokimata to Naka-no-machi in ten 
hours of actual travelling, though the latter portion of the 
journey was on comparatively sluggish water. 

About a month after this I stopped at Shizuoka, a large 
town on the Tokaido, where leyasu, greatest of the Sho- 
guns, spent the end of his life in learned leisure, and where 
Keiki, the last of his successors, deposed in 1868, when the 
Mikado came to his own again, still lives quietly as a pri- 
vate gentleman. How much more dignified and reasonable 
is his Oriental acceptance of the accomplished fact than the 
restless scheming of some Western pretenders, who are un- 
able to see that their ancestors, whether kings or emperors, 
owed their power to national feeling, and persist in a futile 
struggle against the inevitable ! The Japanese obedience 
to law and authority, which must, however indirectly, be an 
expression of the will of the people, was never better shown 
than in the promptness with which the sword-bearing Samu- 
rai ceased to carry their weapons. The Samurai's blade 
had been for centuries his most sacred possession, a halo of 
poetry surrounded it, and the right to wear it in public dis- 
tinguished him from the common herd ; and yet when the 
imperial edict was issued in 1876 he laid it aside without a 

214 




sv 



•^^ 



murmur, and the curio-shops were soon full of swords, which 
a month before their owners would sooner have died than 
lose. It was no doubt very inconvenient to walk about al- 
ways with two swords stuck in your obi, and perhaps he felt 
like the curate in the " Bab Ballads," who was forced by his 
mild rival to curl his hair and smoke — 

" I long have wished for some 
Excuse for this revulsion ; 
Now that excuse has come, 
I do it on compulsion ;" 

but recent events show that though his ordinary life has be- 
come peaceful and bloodless, there has been no falling off 
in the pluck of a Japanese soldier. 

leyasu was first buried at Kuno-zan, which I reached 
after about an hour's ride by jinrikisha from Shizuoka. 
The first part of the way was over a rice - covered plain, 
from which gay-colored hills, striped with white buckwheat, 
dark green tea, and pale green daikon, gradually rose, nar- 
rowing down towards the sea, and finally leaving only a 
strip of sandy soil, mostly planted with sugar - cane, be- 
tween the steep cliffs and the shore. The little villages 
were odorous with drying fish, slices of bonito hanging in 
festoons in front of every cottage, and the shore was dotted 
with evaporating-tubs for getting salt. The mortuary tem- 
ples, which served as a model for those afterwards built at 
Nikko, stand on the top of the cliff, and are reached by a 
zigzag flight of steps cut out of the rock ; they are not so 
elaborate as the Nikko temples or the Shiba shrines, but 
have a severer beauty of their own, which nature has helped 
by decorating every stone and tree - trunk with silvery gray 
lichen, lovely in color against the background of red -lac- 
quered buildings. The interior of the oratory, which, with 
its surrounding fence, has a roof of bronze, is mostly black 



and gold, and there the very affable priests who had shown 
me round held a little service in honor of leyasu, present- 
ing me afterwards with the sweet wine and cakes which had 
been used as offerings. It is commonly said that the body 
of the great Shogun still lies under the simple stone monu- 
ment behind the oratory, and that only a few hairs were 
removed and buried at Nikko ; certainly this is the more 
impressive spot for a warrior's grave, with the wild hills 
behind, and the sea and coast spread out for miles below 
the towering cliif. 

The road on to Okitsu, where I had to rejoin the rail- 
way, led me inland past Ryugeji, a temple where there are 
the finest specimens of the screw-palm {Cycas revolutd) to 
be seen in Japan, and then to the sea again at Shimizu, a 
nice little port, just opposite the sandy fir-clad spit of land 
called Mio-no-matsubara, enclosing a smaller bay in the 
great curve of Suruga, which often appears in Japanese 
pictures. This is the scene of a legend which has been 
dramatized, if you can call them dramas, for one of the 
classical No dances. It tells how a fisherman watching 
his nets saw a fairy alight on the sand and lay aside her 
robe of feathers ; how he managed to steal the robe so 
that she could not fly away again, and only restored it to 
her when she consented to dance for him under the pine- 
trees one of the dances which are never seen by mortal 
eyes. Near the tea-house in Shimizu where I stopped to 
refresh there was a temple dedicated to Inari, the Shinto 
goddess of the rice - fields, whose shrines are guarded by 
foxes ; the approach to it was under three avenues of small 
red wooden torii placed closely together, apparently votive 
offerings, for some of them were old and decayed and oth- 
ers quite bright and new. 

At Numadzu, farther to the east on the Tokaido, but still 
on the shore of Suruga Bay, I again left the train and fol- 



lowed the course of the old road, from which the railway- 
here diverges, as far as Mishima, and then, after crossing 
the ridge of mountain which forms the backbone of the 
Idzu Peninsula, descended to Atami on the western coast 
of Odawara Bay, a favorite watering-place during the win- 
ter months. The orange and banana trees testify to the 
mildness of its climate, and perhaps the geyser, which ev- 
ery fourth hour squirts out mud and boiling water by the 
village street, helps to keep up the temperature. Vries Isl- 
and, with its eternally smoke - capped volcano, lies on the 
horizon away across the sea, and the natives believe that 



n 






AVKNUES OF TORII IN FRONT OF AN INARI TEMPLE, NEAR SHIMIZU 



there is a connection between the two, for whenever Vries 
is particularly active the geyser discharges more violently. 
On the 3d of November I started with a friend from Yo- 
kohama to walk over the Ten Province Pass (Jikkoku-toge) 
to Hakone and Miya-no-shita. It was the Emperor's birth- 
day, and all Atami was gay with flags ; the national ensign 
with a red ball on a white ground fluttered everywhere. We 
mounted the steep street, and looked back at the village 
roofs and the deep blue water of Odawara Bay, and then 
turned into the woods of old camphor-trees surrounding the 



temple Ki-no-miya. Some of the camphors are enormous, 
and the largest of them are encircled with ropes of twisted 
straw and bunches of gohei, which show that they are sa- 
cred objects. Beyond the temple the path ascends, first 
through rice -fields and then up rough grassy hills, until it 
reaches the long plateau of turf where the Ten Province 
stone stands. Though so late in the year, there were still 
plenty of flowers. Down near Atami long sprays of hoto- 
togisu {Tricyrtis)^ wdth spotty purple flowers, hung out from 
the sandy banks, and by our path I saw^ Michaelmas dai- 
sies, golden-rod, dark-blue monk's-hood, sky-blue gentians, 
magenta -flowered garlic, thistles of various colors, wild 
chrysanthemums, pink or white with a gold centre, and the 
beautiful white stars of the grass of Parnassus. The sun 
was quite hot, and we pulled out some provisions and sat 
down on the grass near the stone to enjoy them and the 
marvellous view. To the north the snowy cone of Fuji rose 
high against the blue sky ; between us and it the long crest 
of down-land was mostly covered with suzuki {Eulalia ja- 
ponica), a lovely grass with tall plumes of seed which shine 
like silver gossamer, and the ranges of lower mountains 
were brilliant with the autumnal colors of maples and other 
trees ; below us on the east lay the little peninsula of Mana- 
zura, jutting out into Sagami Bay, with a curve of rice- 
fields on each side of the narrow neck which connects it 
with the mainland, and beyond it the long straight line of 
the Pacific was broken only by Vries Island and its cloud 
of smoke ; a succession of hilly promontories and little bays 
stretched all down the coast of Idzu to the southward, and 
returned northward again up the other side of the penin- 
sula, past Joyama, with a lake-like inlet of sea, to Numadzu, 
where the great sweep of Suruga Bay began, bordered with 
sands and sunny rice-fields, and ended only at Kuno-zan, 
far to the westward. Our path went on along the downs, 




JIZO SAMA, NEAR HAKONE 



through Suzuki, dwarf bamboo, and little stunted woods, 
until a deep descent led us down to. the Hakone Lake, dark 
blue and sombre among its encircling hills ; it then mount- 
ed once more for a short distance, passed the hot springs 
of Ashi-no-yu, and finally, while the grassy hills still glowed 
in the light of the setting sun, brought us down to the 
Fujiya at Miya-no-shita, where a delicious natural warm 
bath and a good dinner made a fitting termination to a 
glorious day. 

At the bottom of a ravine almost perpendicularly below 
Miya-no-shita lies the little village of Dogashima, with a 
turbulent mountain stream and a very shaky bamboo bridge. 
The path and steps leading down to it are kept continually 
green by the overflow from the warm springs, and when I 
was there they swarmed with land-crabs, queer little beasts 
with bodies of dark green, blue, brown, or red, and a pair 
of light-colored claws, which they held up in a threatening 
attitude when I attempted to catch them. As they heard 
me approach they scurried off towards their holes, but they 
were so clumsy and so numerous that I could hardly help 
stepping on them. 

One of the common objects by Japanese road-sides is the 
figure of Jizo, a Buddhist saint who is the helper of all who 
are in trouble, and especially the patron of travellers and 
children. Near the path between Hakone and Ashi-no-yu 
we passed a colossal presentment of him, carved in bold re- 
lief out of a mass of andesite rock, a very striking work of 
some ancient sculptor. It is said to have been done in a 
single night by that marvellously active saint Kobo Daishi, 
who, according to popular tradition, climbed all the moun- 
tains in Japan, and found time, when he was not preaching 
and confounding sceptics, to perform wonders in sculpture, 
painting, and calligraphy. Jizo, in the rudely carved statu- 
ettes by the way-sides, is a benevolent-looking priest, hold- 

P 225 



ing a traveller's staff in his right hand and a globe in his 
left. He stands on a lotus flower, and around his feet are 
piled many pebbles, placed there by wayfarers. The rea- 
son for the custom is this : On the banks of the So-dzu- 
kawa, the river of the lower world, there lives a hag who 
catches little children as they attempt to cross, steals their 
clothes, and makes them toil with her at her endless task 
of piling the stones on its shores. Jizo helps these chil- 
dren, and every pebble which is laid at his feet lightens the 
labor of some little one below. I never passed without add- 
ing my contribution, and if I cannot attribute my safety 
during my wanderings to his kindly aid, at least I am in- 
debted to him for many a pleasant thought, and for the 
memory of many a lovely landscape or flower seen by his 
side. 




BOOKS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY 
ALFRED PARSONS 



A SELECTION FROM THE SONNETS OF WILLIAM 
WORDSWORTH. Illustrated by Alfred Parsons. 4to, 
Full Leather, Gilt Edges, ^5 00. {In a Box.) 

THE WARWICKSHIRE AVON. Notes by A. T. Quillek- 
CoucH. Illustrations by Alfred Parsons. 8vo, Ornament- 
al Half Leather, $2 00. 

THE QUIET LIFE. Certain Verses by Various Hands: 
the Motive set forth in a Prologue and Epilogue by Austin 
DoBSON ; the whole Adorned with Numerous Drawings by 
Edwin A. Abbey and Alfred Parsons. 4to, Ornamental 
Leather, Gilt Edges, $7 50. {In a Box.) 

OLD SONGS. With Drawings by Edwin A. Abbey and 
Alfred Parsons. With Mounted India Proof Frontispiece, 
left loose for framing. 4to, Ornamental Leather Cover, Gilt 
Edges, $7 50. (/« a Box.) 



Published bv HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 



86 1 










V ,<«""' ^,, 



^. -^ , ,. 



^^ 




r .>^^^^, ^^^ac 



^\^^'; 



•:^: 






■^ 












,^ -O. 



■^' 












l^^.O^ 






o ^ 
.^^ -n.. 



<-. '^ 



^ .A 



-^^ 



\ .\ ' 8 



%■ 



'-^^ V^' 



.A 









.% 






"^■^ ^^ 



..V ."■■'■> /^ 









^ ' '/ , "^^ 












^ c,'^ 

^ V 






%^ 






a A oV 



. -^^ 



.^^ s 



V 



c^ 






;,( 'K: 












hiJi 



